Who builds your AI? A few numbers worth knowing
The people training the tools we lean on don't look much like us.
Key takeaway: You talk to AI like it gets you. But the rooms where it's built are mostly men. Here's what that quietly costs us.
By Dear Sarah ·
Be honest. You've typed something into an AI at 1 a.m. that you wouldn't say out loud to anyone. A lot of us have. It feels like it knows us a little.
So it's worth asking the unglamorous question underneath that closeness: who actually built the thing you're confiding in?
The answer, field-wide, is mostly men. Stanford's AI Index found that women make up less than 19% of AI and computer science PhD graduates across North America over the past decade, and just 16% of tenure-track computer science faculty. Those are the people training, researching, and deciding what these systems should do. The general-purpose assistants most of us reach for first — ChatGPT, Grok, Claude — all come out of that same overwhelmingly male pipeline.
It's not a conspiracy. It's a pattern. Writing in the LSE Business Review, behavioral scientist Pragya Agarwal calls it a "leaky pipeline" — women enter tech, then drift out before they ever reach the rooms where the real decisions get made. So the worldview baked into the tools tilts, quietly, toward the people who stayed.
Why this lands on you
When the people building a tool don't share your life, your needs become an afterthought instead of a starting point. Not out of malice. Just absence. The questions that never get asked because nobody in the room was ever the one waiting on a late period, talking herself down before a salary negotiation, or wondering if the pain she described was being taken seriously.
You feel that gap in small ways. A chatbot that's confident where you needed it to be careful. Advice that assumes a life that isn't yours. It's the difference between a tool that was built for you and one you're quietly adapting yourself to fit.
Knowing this doesn't mean you stop using AI. It means you use it with your eyes open — as a smart, useful, deeply imperfect thing, not an oracle. You stay the author of your own story. It's the assistant, not the source of truth.
One thing to try today: next time an AI hands you advice about your body, your money, or your worth, ask it out loud, "who decided that?" Notice whether the answer holds up to your life. That small habit of pushback is its own kind of power.
Women built the early software that put people on the moon. We belong in these rooms, not just in the chat window. The more of us who notice who's missing, the faster that changes.
Quote to sit with
"We have to socialize our girls to be comfortable with imperfection, and we've got to do it now." — Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code
💌 Sarah
Sources
- The 2024 AI Index Diversity Report: An Unmoving Needle — Stanford HAI
- AIs are designed and trained - by men - to be sexist towards women — LSE Business Review