AI is getting women wrong, the cost is growing

Published 22 June 2026 · tech

The warning comes as most recent studies show that as generative AI has become part of everyday life for billions of people - from drafting

The warning comes as most recent studies show that as generative AI has become part of everyday life for billions of people - from drafting emails to planning campaigns and creating presentations – inequalities are also being reinforced through discriminatory algorithms. In the United Kingdom alone, 88 per cent of and media agencies are already using the technology in some form. Ahead of the United Nations Global Dialogue on Artificial Intelligence Governance and the AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva early July, UN Women is urging governments, companies and developers to ensure gender equality is built into the design, deployment and governance of AI systems. Gender and racial bias Evidence suggests the problem is widespread. A study of 133 AI systems found that 44 per cent demonstrated gender bias, while more than a quarter showed both gender and racial bias. Large language models have repeatedly associated women with the home, family and childcare, while linking men to business, leadership and career success. In some cases, AI systems have generated responses portraying women as sexual objects or as subordinate to men. According to UN Women, when researchers asked large language models to simply complete a sentence that began with a person's gender, about one in five responses came back sexist or misogynistic. Some even described women as property, as objects. Not a design flaw These outcomes, experts say, are not random errors or a glitch in AI, but instead a pattern documented across systems at scale. They are the predictable output of AI systems trained on decades of unequal representation of women and men, UN Women notes.

Speaking to UN News, Jayathma Wickramanayake, UN Women Lead on Digital Technologies, explained that AI models “pull bias from decades of text written by people, about people, in a world where women were filed under home and family, and men were filed under business and career”. For Ms. Wickramanayake, the most worrisome part is that this is not a design flaw – “it’s a real policy gap that was left wide open”. Of 138 countries assessed worldwide, only 24 referred to gender in their national AI strategies, and just 18 included substantive gender-responsive measures. For the UN Women digital expert, this isn’t a bug waiting to be fixed in the next update, “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”. Online harms intensifying For many women and girls, the risks extend beyond stereotypes. Women already face disproportionate levels of abuse online, and AI is making some forms of violence easier to create and spread. Listen to an interview with a UN Women expert on the increase of “manosphere” online influencers Soundcloud According to UN Women data, nearly one in four surveyed women human rights defenders, activists and journalists reported experiencing AI-assisted online violence. Twelve per cent said personal images had been shared without their consent, while six per cent reported being targeted by deepfakes or manipulated images and videos. As AI-generated content becomes the norm, concerns are growing that harassment, manipulation, and image-based abuse will become harder to detect and prevent.