AI Gender Gap Is Putting Women’s Jobs, Safety and Place in Public Life at Risk

According to the Gender Snapshot 2026 figures cited by UN Women, women make up around 22 per cent of AI professionals globally and hold fewer than 14 per cent of senior leadership positions.

Public debate about artificial intelligence often centres on what the technology might do to humanity in the future, leaving less attention for the harm women and girls are experiencing today. UN Women is drawing attention to inequalities that already run through the growing AI economy, from who gets hired and promoted to who can use the technology and whose safety it puts at risk. Its message places women's participation, working lives and protection from violence at the centre of decisions being made about AI.

Women Are Missing From the Decisions That Shape AI

According to the Gender Snapshot 2026 figures cited by UN Women, women make up around 22 per cent of AI professionals globally and hold fewer than 14 per cent of senior leadership positions. Women are around 20 per cent less likely than men to use generative AI tools, exposing a gap that reaches beyond employment into everyday access and experience. These figures raise a basic question about whose needs shape technologies that are becoming part of work and daily life, particularly when women have so little representation in the teams and leadership groups responsible for them.

"The future of AI cannot be built by half the world's talent," said Sarah Hendriks, UN Women's Director of Policy, Programme and Intergovernmental Support. Hendriks called for women's equal participation in AI design, governance and regulation, warning that their exclusion could carry today's inequalities into tomorrow's systems. Her warning connects representation with the choices behind the technology: who helps build it, who decides how it should be used and who has the authority to challenge decisions that reinforce discrimination.

Online Violence Is Becoming Faster and More Severe

AI is increasing the scale, speed and severity of technology-facilitated violence against women and girls, alongside reinforcing gender stereotypes and structural discrimination. Women in public life face particular risks, with a UN Women study cited in the release finding that almost one in four incidents of online violence against women human rights defenders, activists and journalists involved AI. That finding places the technology within an existing pattern of abuse directed at women whose work involves speaking publicly, defending rights and holding people or institutions accountable.

The concern extends beyond individual incidents to the conditions under which women can participate in public life, as increasingly powerful tools give perpetrators more ways to cause harm. UN Women's call for stronger safeguards recognises that access to technology cannot be separated from safety, especially when the same systems opening up opportunities can increase the reach and severity of abuse. Addressing those risks requires attention to the discrimination AI can reproduce as well as the violence it can facilitate.

Women's Jobs Face Greater Exposure to Change

Occupations dominated by women are almost twice as likely to be exposed to generative AI as those dominated by men, according to the International Labour Organization. Women's concentration in clerical, administrative and business support work helps explain the imbalance, because many tasks in these jobs can be automated or substantially changed. Exposure does not automatically mean job loss; the ILO expects the most widespread effects to concern job quality, including changes to workloads, monitoring and workers' control over their tasks.

At the United Nations General Assembly High-Level Week in New York, UN Women is calling on governments, development partners and technology companies to strengthen AI safeguards and regulation, ensure women's equal participation in development and decision-making, and address the risks facing women and girls. Those demands connect the opportunity to shape AI with protection from its harms, placing responsibility on the institutions developing, financing and governing technology that is already changing people's lives.