Technology has priors for liberating and empowering women. Think of the washing machine and microwave for example, which were made available at a time when much, if not all, of household tasks fell to women.
These time-saving appliances transformed how many homemakers lived day-to-day.
Fast forward to 2025 where the rapidly-evolving world of AI is the technology of the moment, and refreshingly, much of the discourse is centred on battling bias.
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This is expected to have significant positive outcomes for women in the workplace, but the journey to get here has not been smooth sailing.
AI bias in action
Several high-profile AI tools were widely-reported as perpetuating bias in recent years.
According to a Stanford Law School study from 2024, chatbots such as Google AI’s PaLM-2 and OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4 displayed “significant disparities across names associated with race and gender.”
For example, if a candidate is named Tamika, a chatbot may advise that she should be paid $79,375 as a lawyer; but, if the candidate is named Todd, the suggested pay offer increases to $82,485.
When it comes to hiring, advanced AI tools used to parse CVs and shortlist candidates in seconds, such as Robin, are trained on diverse and representative data that beats cognitive bias.
So while a person’s name, home address, age or name of educational institutions attended are not analyzed, their skills and experience are.
Similarly, talent management tools like Dash work in the same way for internal mobility, identifying existing staff with the right skills and experience for promotion.
Equally not considered by advanced AI are hobbies. So membership of particular golf or country clubs no longer holds sway when advanced AI tools are implemented in the hiring process.
This is good news for women, because according to a 2022 study from three U.S. academics entitled “Potential” and the Gender Promotion Gap, while men are often promoted for showing promise, women are expected to have achieved something significant first.
If an AI tool is scanning for experience, this gives women who have achieved strong results a leg up over other less-qualified male candidates who simply show promise.
Effects of automation
Gen AI is much lauded for its ability to take over tedious tasks, technically meaning employees should have more time for upskilling, strategic and planning work, networking and mentorship.
These are all areas identified by McKinsey as countering the “broken rung”, which is blocking women’s career progress to junior management where leadership skills are usually honed.
However, much of the work that AI can take on is in sectors like administrative support, retail, and customer service, all areas where women predominate in the workforce.
This suggests that women are more vulnerable to job displacement, a theory backed up by Mercer’s 2024 Global Talent Trends Study, which outlines that women are more likely to suffer professionally because they occupy a greater proportion of the jobs that AI is predicted to disrupt.
The disparity between men and women’s job security is more pronounced in developed countries, like the U.S..
A study by the International Labour Organization (ILO) found that 7.9% of female workers in high-income countries are at risk of job automation due to AI, compared to 2.9% of male workers. Still, in developing countries, men’s professionals are still more secure, as the figures for job loss risk are 1.3% for men but 2.7% for women.
However, if women make it to leadership positions, they may be at a distinct advantage in the AI Age.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) has highlighted soft skills that AI cannot replicate, like team leadership, strategic leadership and collaboration, are set to be valued higher in the coming years. And women were found to possess a 28% higher percentage of soft skills than men, as listed on LinkedIn.
Plus, women are simultaneously advancing their own technical upskilling. The proportion of women with AI skills and the concentration of women in AI engineering have increased dramatically since 2016, leading the WEF to say: “The advent of GenAI presents an opportunity to help close the gender gap.”
What this opportunity requires is organisations actively supporting gender parity by promoting women internally and hiring women into leadership positions. Plus, it also requires a continued bias focus in tech companies to ensure AI tools and products are and remain bias free.
