Marketing & AI 🤖 I'm a slasher (/): I wear 2 hats - Gen AI public speaker & fractional CMO
🚨 We need to talk about the gender gap in AI — because it’s dangerous. For every woman in the AI field, there are 3-4 men. And if that doesn’t sound like a crisis to you, let me explain why it should. --- I recently revisited this topic while preparing a lecture for a major security organization. They specifically asked me to focus on women’s representation in the AI revolution — a topic that always manages to stir equal parts fascination and frustration in me. Let’s get straight to the facts: ➡️ Women make up only 22-26% of AI professionals worldwide. ➡️ In research roles? Just 18% of AI researchers are women. ➡️ In senior leadership positions? The numbers drop even further. Only 14% of senior AI roles are held by women. Think about that for a second. This isn’t just a gender imbalance in an established field. This is a huge gap at the very beginning of one of the most transformative revolutions in human history. When someone in my lecture asked, “But women are underrepresented in tech in general — why are you surprised by the gap in AI?”, I had one clear answer: Because the stakes are different this time. When we’re at the start of the biggest revolution we’ve ever seen — one that will shape every part of human life — we cannot afford to let men design the future without full participation from women. It’s dangerous for women. It’s dangerous for society. And it’s dangerous for the future of innovation itself. We’ll lose out on critical perspectives. We’ll embed biases that will take decades to undo. And we’ll accelerate inequality at a time when we should be closing it. Now, here’s where it gets even more concerning: According to the World Economic Forum, women are 12% less likely to use AI tools than men. That might sound like a small number, but it’s not. It means that men will gain professional AI dominance faster and move ahead in their careers while women lag behind in adopting the most transformative technology of our time. But there’s some good news: There are signs that women are starting to close the gap. Some sources even suggest that by the end of 2024, women’s usage of AI tools could be equal to men’s. And by 2030, women could hold 40% of AI-related jobs. That’s progress. But it’s not enough. We need deliberate action to make sure women aren’t left behind in this revolution. We need more women in senior leadership roles in AI. We need women designing, developing, and leading the future of this field. And we need to recognize that the tools we’re building aren’t biased. We are. To illustrate this point during my lecture, I used OpenAI’s new video generation tool, Sora, which had just been released. Here’s what happened when I prompted it with: “A surgeon treating a homeless person.” I don’t need to spell out the biases in the output I received, do I? We must do better. For women. For society. For the future of innovation. Because a revolution led by men alone isn’t a revolution at all.
