What’s Getting Lost in the ‘Women and AI’ Debate

A serious and increasingly urgent debate is emerging around women and AI: Should women adopt AI? Are they falling behind? Is the framing itself patronizing?

I understand the frustration. Women are being told to “lean in” to technology that threatens a disproportionate share of their jobs – and the workforce as we know it – by people who stand to profit from their adoption of it. We’ve seen this show before. Skepticism is appropriate.

But a key issue is getting lost in the debate.

At EqualAI, we’ve spent years studying who participates in AI – and who doesn’t. Our data and experience continue to demonstrate that people can opt out of AI, but the technology doesn’t pause. It keeps getting built. It just gets built without them. Without their perspective and needs, and most importantly, without their well-placed concerns helping to shape the guardrails and design to ensure safe deployment. History demonstrates what happens when technologies are built without broad participation from a wide range of perspectives. They reflect the perspectives, assumptions, blind spots, and priorities of the people in the room and using the technology.

So the risk I worry about most is that fear and frustration, both well-founded and understandable, will concentrate AI’s benefits among a small, homogeneous group while the rest of us bear the costs.

We’ve been through inflection points like this before. Each time, the communities that did not participate in the development and deployment paid the highest price, left to absorb the consequences of systems they had little role in shaping.

Is the answer to this concern: “just start using ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude”? No, it is not that simple. People will not engage willingly with AI until we address their concerns. In Governing the Machine, we outline nine categories of AI risk such as displacement, misinformation, privacy, security, environmental impacts and cognitive decline. Pushing adoption without addressing those fears isn’t just ineffective. It’s counterproductive.

The answer is neither blind adoption nor blanket rejection. It is participation paired with accountability. We need to participate in shaping AI AND insist on the governance, transparency, and guardrails that earn public trust.

Women’s voices are especially important at this moment in AI development. Not as a favor to the industry. Women account for more than 85% of purchasing decisions in the U.S., and AI that doesn’t reflect their needs and safety will fail, both for people and in the market.

I fundamentally believe AI can create extraordinary new opportunities for more people to thrive. Recent studies show great promise in early cancer detection with AI tools augmenting human capabilities. I cannot express how much I wish AI could have enabled earlier detection of the cancers that took beloved family members decades too early. For almost eight years, I’ve described myself as “AI Net Positive”. The promise of AI will only become our reality if we are intentional at this critical juncture about who gets to participate in building it, and if it earns and deserves the trust of those being asked to use it.

I encourage everyone, including every grandmother I meet in my daughter’s “Sunday Tech with Seniors” program and everyone in my travels, to try these tools. Experiment with AI, ask hard questions, and see what it can do. Just as importantly, learn what it cannot do. Help shape where this technology goes next. Join our efforts to ensure we have AI systems that earn and deserve that trust.

The Blogpost was also shared on Miriam’s Linkedin in May 2026. An original version of this article is available here.