The first time a venture fund assumed I was an executive assistant for my male cofounder, I laughed. The second time it happened, I responded with a curt clarification, “I’m actually the CEO.” By the third time, I started to wonder why the broader tech industry seemed unable to process the idea of a female executive in generative AI.
While it might be easy to scapegoat the so-called “pipeline problem,” arguing there simply aren’t enough women making their way through the maze of academia and industry, the percentage of women pursuing careers in artificial intelligence aligns fairly closely to the overall trends in STEM. In other words, women appear to be equally underrepresented in AI as they are in other STEM fields.
As an AI founder myself, I meet and work with women every day who are running AI/machine learning (ML) research labs, adopting generative AI tools in the enterprise, and considering the ethical impacts of this new technology. I can easily point out women in pivotal roles across the AI sector, like OpenAI’s Mira Murati and Stanford’s Fei-Fei Li. Yet, women are conspicuously absent from recent lists celebrating AI leaders. Women can be the flirty voice of your AI assistant, but not the metaphorical voice for the AI industry. So where is the disconnect?
New industry, same voices
Gen AI only entered the mainstream with the launch of ChatGPT in 2022. Since then, the pace of innovation has been unprecedented.
In the face of this uncertainty, there has been a natural inclination to defer to anyone claiming to know the way forward, which has invariably meant traditional tech CEOs with large megaphones. Sam Altman, Satya Nadella, Elon Musk and others lack graduate degrees and deep AI engineering experience, but they have the credibility that comes from already leading respected tech organizations. Even as new leaders have gained influence through the growing prominence of generative AI—among them Demis Hassabis of Google’s DeepMind and Dario Amodei of Anthropic—they’ve earned recognition through traditional resumes in academia and Big Tech, which are the same pathways that have long been hostile and gatekeeping to women. With AI, the underlying technology may be new, but the gender power imbalance is not.
Front end vs. deep tech
The AI frenzy has largely been focused on research-oriented, science-heavy solutions like large-language models (LLMs). Organizations such as OpenAI and Anthropic have…
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