Artificial intelligence is entering our boardrooms, classrooms, and living rooms with a speed that makes the smartphone revolution seem almost leisurely. This rapid adoption understandably sparks anxiety for many women: the same black box algorithms that can draft a legal contract in seconds can just as easily embed hidden biases that have long kept women from the C suite. Yet, anxiety is only one side of that story. On the other side, AI, with its ability to rewire access to capital and the hierarchy of value placed on “hard skills,” has the potential to become the most significant engine of wealth generation for women in our lifetime.
Let’s first consider capital flow. A decade of PitchBook data reveals companies founded solely by women attracted two percent of U.S. venture capital dollars in 2023. Compound that with women being only 17 percent of individuals writing checks and making decisions inside venture firms. Yet, for founders with a laptop, access to affordable GPU time, and low code frameworks, generative AI provides the ability to replace seven figure engineering teams and delay the need for intensive capital raises. Just as platforms like Etsy and Shopify previously empowered countless individual entrepreneurs to launch e-commerce stores, generative AI is now revolutionizing complex software development, offering an opportunity for solopreneurship at an unprecedented scale. One woman alone can fine tune an open source model on public data, launch a beta product swiftly, and engage with paying users before ever setting foot into a pitch meeting, potentially rendering that meeting entirely unnecessary. As upfront capital intensity diminishes, so does the power of the gatekeeper.
The labor market will undergo an equally profound shift. Large language models are already adept at summarizing spreadsheets, generating first draft code, and assembling research and legal briefs. These tasks have disproportionately anchored high pay roles and fueled a gender imbalance. Yet in the wake of AI adoption, the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs 2025 survey identifies skills like “leadership and social influence,” “empathy and active listening,” and “service orientation” among the fastest growing across industries. Relationship capital, or the ability to persuade, negotiate, and build coalitions, is now on track to outweigh technical prowess, offering women a comparative advantage that cannot be easily measured on a balance sheet.
The opportunity falters, however, if hiring mechanisms are biased. University of Washington researchers ran identical resumes through advanced screening models, finding that algorithms consistently favored certain demographic associations for advancement, with preferences reaching as high as 85 percent for some groups, while others were automatically bypassed. Given that an applicant who never receives a call back has no effective recourse, traditional anti discrimination laws, robust in principle, are often impossible to apply here.
States like New York, Colorado, and Illinois have taken important steps on the impact of these algorithms on hiring practices, but the government alone cannot solve this. Women must be at the table for scalable solutions accepted by the public and private sector: third party accreditation, industry wide standards and consensus building on trustworthy AI deployment. From drafting protocols to shaping governance frameworks, solutions must reflect lived experience, not just theoretical principles.
Companies that want to have the best talent can start by dealing with this on the front end. Any hiring contract with a vendor should include audit rights, data retention clauses, and a warranty against proxy variables like ZIP codes or credit scores. Owning your data layer will be a necessity, not a luxury. Whether an organization comprises radiologists or supply chain managers, curating high quality micro datasets will become its most defensible intellectual property in this age of AI and a protection against future liability. Those that allocate capital may find outsized returns investing in this new wave of accessible entrepreneurship with smaller teams and solopreneurs, with women well positioned to thrive. And women, in turn, must actively participate in policy discussions, including state AI task forces and procurement boards, to ensure that the initial generations of rules are shaped by those who must later live by them.
AI adoption will not wait for society to close gender gaps. But the new economy will be defined by those who have a voice early in the process. The choice is clear: we can allow this technology to perpetuate existing inequities, or we can intentionally shape it to reward the relational and creative competencies that jobs of the future demand, which many women already bring to the table. With its foundational code, regulatory frameworks, and wealth creation pathways still taking form, this is our critical window to embed our principles and priorities into AI's very design before it's too late.
