AI Is Still Getting Women Wrong
Half the world's experiences, still treated like an edge case.
Key takeaway: A new UN Women study audited 133 AI systems — almost half showed gender bias. Here's what stood out, and one small thing you can try this week.
By Dear Sarah · · Updated
This week, UN Women released a study I haven't been able to stop thinking about, and I want to talk about it with you, because it isn't really about AI. It's about whose life the machine assumes is the default one.
Researchers audited 133 AI systems. Forty-four percent showed gender bias. More than a quarter showed both gender and racial bias. When they asked big language models to complete sentences that mentioned a person's gender, about one in five answers came back sexist or misogynistic. Some systems described women as property. Most just kept filing women under "home and family," and men under "business and career," over and over, in a quiet loop nobody hears.
Jayathma Wickramanayake, UN Women's lead on digital technologies, said it plainly: this is "not a design flaw — it's a real policy gap that was left wide open." It's "a choice that we make over and over in training data, in design rooms, in policy documents that stay silent on half of the population."
Read that again. Choice. Not an accident, not a quirk, not a bug. A choice.
Here's why that matters for you. You probably already use AI — for resumes, recipes, travel plans, hard emails, the thing you can't quite say out loud. When the model behind the curtain has been reading the world for years as if you weren't fully in it, its suggestions show up shaped by that. Resume advice that tells you to "soften" yourself. A health symptom that gets dismissed because the dataset skews male. A picture generator that defaults to "CEO" and hands you a man in a suit, every single time, until you specifically ask it not to.
It's not your imagination. The defaults aren't neutral. They never were.
One thing to try this week
Audit one AI tool you already use — gently, like a friend who has your back. Ask it for a list of "great founders" or "great scientists." See who shows up. Ask it for an image of a leader. Notice the gap. Then push back, in the chat: "give me only women," "show me women of color," "rewrite this without softening me." You're not being difficult. You're teaching the room that you're in it.
And if you ever build, fund, or hire near one of these systems, bring more women into the design room. That's where the gap closes.
"I truly believe if you have a face, you have a place in the conversation about AI." — Joy Buolamwini, founder of the Algorithmic Justice League
💌 Sarah