Leaning In, But Still Left Out: Women's Advancement and The Growing AI Bias Challenge

In the mid-1980s, my Indian immigrant mother became visible in the economic system during an ordinary evening at Fashion Bug in the DuBois Mall. The catalyst was simple – a store credit card.

She didn't need it, she insisted. Her husband was a doctor. She could afford the clothes.

But the sales associate changed her mind with a conspiratorial whisper, as if sharing a secret: this wasn't just about charging purchases. It was an invitation to build credit. Through this card, my mother could start adding data to the American credit score system. This would give her a financial reputation she could leverage for higher credit limits, car purchases, mortgages, and even small business loans.

There was just one catch: she needed a man's permission. Despite managing our household budget, pursuing her education, and working part-time as a teacher, my mother didn't earn enough to qualify independently. In a world designed by men, her economic contributions as a mother, student, and educator were undervalued. She needed a male gatekeeper – my father – to vouch for her.

This was her era's challenge. Men granted access to the courses she wanted to take, the jobs she wanted to pursue, and the cars she wanted to drive. So she set out to make their permission easier to obtain and raised her daughter to do the same – through education and career advancement.

Fast forward thirty-plus years, and women no longer need permission to participate in the traditional spaces of men's worlds.

Women are now better educated than men. They now comprise 51% of the college-educated workforce in the United States. In the European Union, 48.8% of women aged 25-34 had completed post-high school education in 2023, compared to 37.6% of men. These trends are spreading like wildfire internationally.

Women are also continuing to rise in stature across the workforce. They now make up about a third of workers in America’s 10 highest-paying occupations, a significant increase from just 13% in 1980. They notably hold powerful and visible positions in politics, culture, and the arts.

Most impactfully, they control a vast majority of the wealth in terms of purchasing power, decision-making influence and absolute assets under control. Women are responsible for 70-80% of all consumer purchasing decisions in the US today. They make up 80% of all healthcare decisions across the globe. They are about to become the world’s biggest pool of investors, as young women receive the biggest transfer of inherited wealth over the next decade from their baby boomer parents.

Combined with their rising incomes, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that women have now earned the right to run the world.

However, at a time when women have earned their seats at the table of decision-making, decisions are being moved and automated away from them – from people to machines.

Companies are rapidly leveraging artificial intelligence to automate decision-making. In a recent McKinsey survey, 65% percent of respondents reported that their organizations are regularly using gen AI, nearly double the percentage from 2023. By the end of 2024, it's projected that 61% of EU healthcare organizations will use AI for disease diagnosis. 75% of business leaders believe that what will set companies apart from their competitors in the future will be determined by who has the most advanced generative AI

The problem for women is that these machine models are trained on data from a world in which they have historically been underrepresented. Algorithms are being trained based on data sets across healthcare, corporate behaviors, business strategies, consumer insights, purchasing patterns, and others that are dominated by male information and perspectives.

Because so much data fails to take into account gender, because it treats men as the default and women as atypical, bias and discrimination are baked into our systems. - Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women

In addition, the seats at the technology tables are still heavily guarded. Only a quarter of all tech jobs held by women and the majority of technical and leadership roles held by men. Specifically, women make up only 22% of AI professionals globally. Only 13.83% of AI paper authors are women, only 18% of authors at the leading AI conferences are women and just 2% of venture capital was directed towards start-ups founded by women in 2019.

This means that machine decisions are being automated to the exclusion of the female perspective and experience. The impact of this on how the next generation of technology is being designed cannot be underestimated.

As famous feminist author Simone de Beauvoir once wrote: “Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth.”

When that truth, filled with gender bias and exclusion of women, gets institutionalized into fact – and cloaked in invisible code – it becomes the definition of the world. That definition then risks expanding the very invisibility, disrespect and marginalization of women that they’ve fought so hard to end across the world.

In healthcare, for example, this will show up in the perpetuation of poorer care and medical outcomes for women as compared to men. 40% of women report that they’ve had negative healthcare experiences. This is, in part because 64% of common medical interventions disadvantage women due to their lower effectiveness – driven by the fact that they’ve gotten less research attention across the decades. Women’s absence in health data means AI models don’t train on their information. To be better included, women need to interact more robustly and proactively with healthcare – something that is made more difficult when close to half have already had experiences that make them distrustful of the system.

Likewise, by not knowing the data and how algorithms work, women will become more vulnerable to the more nefarious uses of AI, such as in retail. As marketers and social media platforms employ AI more effectively to sell goods and services to women, a lack of awareness of how AI and its influence works can make female consumers – the vast majority – more suspectable to manipulation, spending, and other nudges that, put quite simply, separate them from their money.

The institutionalization of gender-based biased through AI is happening every day around us. It’s urgent women start taking proactive steps to fight them, and there’s a broad range of ways to engage for everyone:

1. Seek out career opportunities to work with AI and data: Increasing female representation in AI development is crucial. More and more women can and should seek out educational and work opportunities in these fields to help shape the future of technology.

2. Advocate for diverse datasets: Women in AI and related fields should understand the risks of data bias and push for the use of more representative and inclusive datasets in AI training.

3. Support and mentor other women: Join in data-related networking events, mentorship programs, book clubs and other community efforts to help more women band together to influence and succeed in AI and tech fields.

4. Engage in policy advocacy both in companies and government: Women can advocate for policies that promote gender equality in AI development and implementation, such as those proposed in the Global Digital Compact.

5. Raise awareness: Read voraciously about the issues, including Invisible Women by Caroline Creado Perez and others about the potential for AI bias and its implications so to be well-educated as issues arise and on how to support change.

In other words, as women continue to make strides in education and the workforce, it's crucial to ensure that emerging technologies like AI do not become new gatekeepers to gender equality progress.

The good news is, women have earned the right to influence. By recognizing this, mobilizing together, and actively engaging in AI development and advocacy, we can demand a more equitable technological future commensurate to our hard-earned power and influence.

I would love to send you more articles like this one. Please sign up for my newsletter here and let's continue the conversation around building health, wealth, and human connections.