The AI Gender Gap - International Trademark Association

Will women lead the AI revolution or be left behind by it? The numbers tell a stark story. In a report published in 2024, the World Economic Forum found that only 22 percent of AI professionals globally are women. According to the International Labor Organization, women are three times more likely than men to lose their jobs due to AI-driven automation, and they are 25 percent less likely to adopt AI tools in the first place. A recent Harvard study across 18 countries found that even when AI tools are equally accessible, women adopt them at significantly lower rates.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (AI-Powered Women Summit, USA)

According to LinkedIn, women are 138 percent behind men in AI literacy skills. Yet, and here’s the twist, women consistently outperform men in 11 of 12 emotional intelligence competencies, skills that account for 67 percent of leadership effectiveness, and organizations with female senior leaders are 60 percent more likely to have AI ethics codes in place. So, we’re facing a critical paradox. The very people who possess the skills to make AI ethical, successful, and human-centered are the ones being systematically excluded from how it’s created, governed, and integrated into our lives.

Nikita Roy (Newsroom Robots Lab, USA)

In an excerpt from a recent episode of INTA’s podcast, Brand & New, we’re not just discussing these statistics but exploring how to shatter them. Ayala Deutsch, 2020 INTA President and Executive Champion for INTA’s Women’s LeadershIP Initiative, sat down with Dr. Felicia Newhouse, founder of the AI-Powered Women Summit at MIT, and Nikita Roy, data scientist, journalist, founder of Newsroom Robots Lab, and host of the globally acclaimed Newsroom Robots podcast. They explored ways to challenge the statistics that underscore male dominance in the AI sector while championing women’s unique skills and perspectives to ensure AI is integrated into society in a thoughtful, ethical, and sustainable manner.

Below is an excerpt of this Brand & New  interview. It includes some minor edits to improve readability.

Ayala Deutsch: I’m curious about your origin stories and your own journeys. AI wasn’t exactly the career path most of us grew up dreaming about. So how did both of you end up becoming experts in this new and exciting space?
Felicia Newhouse: I spent 20 years in product development in tech start-ups—building tech, big data. Later that became machine learning. I had a lot of fun doing it. I was typically one of the only women, if not the only woman on most of the teams I worked on. So there’s a long story about the ups and downs and trials and tribulations of that journey. That brought me to a deep awareness of how much women needed support inside and outside the workplace. I did a PhD across MIT, Harvard University, and Lesley University into the ways that women can sustainably be supported as leaders, really understanding more deeply women leadership and what’s unique about women leadership and how that impacts the sustainable growth of businesses and responsible use of technologies.

This brought me to what I’m doing now, which is running the AI-Powered Women Summit at MIT and bringing all these incredible women thought leaders from all over the world to not only talk about AI but explore its broader implications. I loved your introduction about emotional intelligence and those unique aspects of female leadership because what we’re doing at the conference is not only having the technologists in the room, but we’re also having poets and anthropologists and historians and spiritual leaders—women who are thinking about this from a theologian perspective, people who are thinking about this from a futurist perspective, an emotional intelligence perspective—how we’re burned out, how we’re multidimensional as women. We want to bring our whole self into the workplace, and we can’t, or we don’t feel like we can because it’s not an emotionally safe space to do so. It’s not popular to bring your whole vulnerable self into the workplace, but those are women’s superpowers.

AD: Nikita, how did you go from being a journalist to becoming someone who’s teaching other journalists about AI?
Nikita Roy: A lot of my journey at the intersection of AI and journalism started while I was studying data science at Harvard University. I was also creating a media company at that time and that’s when ChatGPT arrived and generated this whole buzz around it. A lot of the conversation in the news industry was that AI is going to take over the job of a journalist. As someone who was a data scientist and worked as a publisher, I didn’t see that being the case, but I wanted to create a platform and the podcast [Newsroom Robots] became a place where we could talk about what was happening with AI in journalism—what it meant to remove all the hype and just get into the nitty-gritty of what it meant for the future of the media industry; how our work is going to evolve.

AD: I mentioned at the start that there are some concerning statistics. For example, the Harvard study that shows women are 25 percent less likely than men to adopt AI tools. And you mentioned ChatGPT, Nikita. Only 27 percent of ChatGPT downloads come from women. Felicia, why do you think that is? And what can we do to close that gap?
FN: One of the biggest reasons [as indicated by] the data is that women feel that they’re being a fraud by using AI: that they’re cheating their way somehow, that they’re being unethical in using it. So one of the challenges there, is really addressing (a) a confidence gap, and (b) an imposter syndrome gap, and the two go hand in hand. When many women are experiencing this kind of imposter syndrome in AI, you have to peel back the layers and look at the broader context. A lot of times this is happening because they’re in male-dominated spaces where they don’t feel safe, and they’re already fighting so hard to continue to evolve in their career. So they have much more on the line if they go to use a technology that makes them maybe look like they’re not doing the best thing from an integrity standpoint, or they’re cheating, or they mess up. So that confidence gap is important to address with education. We also have science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) considerations, where fewer women are pursuing computer science degrees. Those qualifications lead to a greater ability to understand the deeper aspects of machine learning, yet only 20 percent of computer science grads in the U.S. are women.

AD: Nikita, you’re teaching people how to use AI tools in your classes and workshops in the Newsroom Robots Lab. From your experience working directly with women and trying to get them comfortable with AI, what do you see happening in the moment? What brings the moment where someone goes from “I’m kind of intimidated by this” to, “Oh, I actually get this, this is great”?
NR: I think the biggest thing that I always focus on is this: how can I make my workshops inclusive? So that starts with this question: how can we reduce the intimidation barrier? So first, it starts with helping them understand where AI fits into their own day-to-day work. It’s not about completely showing a new tool—and this is how you go off and use it—but understanding their own workflows and then getting them to think of AI not as a technical tool, but as a strategic problem-solving tool—something that augments the work that you’re already doing—and showing them examples of use cases where it’s helped people in their own positions do the work better, faster, and more creatively and seeing how that can amplify their skills. A lot of times what I tend to see is when you show people examples and inspiration from people who look like them, who have the same skill set that they do, they’re inspired. It motivates them to go ahead and try to use these tools.

AD: Nikita, you wear many hats. You’re a journalist. You refer to your background as a data scientist, but you’ve also been an entrepreneur. I’m wondering, how do you think for women who want to follow in those footsteps, what is the opportunity for AI to create new revenue streams or sustainable business models or drive entrepreneur opportunities for women?
NR: I think AI is opening up a lot of ways in which people can step into entrepreneurship and be able to at least see what’s possible. One of the ways in which to think of AI is as your co-founder, because even if you have never had any sort of technical background or coding skills, AI allows you to create some sort of prototype so that you can go from idea to execution faster than ever before. You don’t need a huge team of engineers, a huge budget to just test out an idea to see if something is there or not.

One thing that I’ve learned through entrepreneurship is that I’ve had to do almost every single task in my company at some point in time, especially at the early stages. A lot of that was new to me. And I’ve been an entrepreneur before AI and after AI has come on the scene. I just see the massive shift in the way I’m able to think through different challenges. I’m able to think through different things, and I’m able to upskill myself. I now know what I don’t know, because I can go and ask AI, “What am I missing here?”

AD: Nikita, what’s your vision of the next generation of women in AI? What would success look like to you?
NR: Currently, the biggest issue is a psychological barrier. A lot of times people think that if you don’t come from tech, maybe you don’t belong in that AI conversation. I think that’s what I would flip on its head and that’s my vision for the future: that a lot of women are in that room are at that table along with me. We’re not the only few women in a room filled with people who don’t always look like us. I think that’s one of the main things I would hope for—that we’re able to lean into the strengths that women bring into such conversations and that AI is finally able to catch up to getting women at the table.

AD: It’s a human challenge. It’s not a tech challenge. I’ve heard that from both of you throughout this conversation. Felicia, you used the phrase “AI-powered woman.” What do you think it truly means to be an AI-powered woman?
FN: I think it’s to be in your empowerment. It’s to feel like you can be in your fullness—in your full brilliance as a woman. And I think one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned through all of this with AI-powered women and collaborating with all these incredible women from different backgrounds around the world that are bridging into AI is that transformation requires stillness. It doesn’t require going faster. That’s completely against what everyone’s going to tell you in tech. It’s not a popular opinion, but I think it’s the right way to look at this: the more we slow down and listen, especially to other women, the faster I think we’re going to move with intention and the more sustainable we’re going to build the businesses and the backbone of our future society.

Listen to the full episode of the Brand & New podcast.

Although every effort has been made to verify the accuracy of this article, readers are urged to check independently on matters of specific concern or interest. The opinions expressed in this interview are those of the persons being interviewed and do not purport to reflect the views of INTA or its members.

Topics Artificial Intelligence Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion The Women's LeadershIP Initiative