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Will Women Get Left Behind in the AI Economy?
From Day One Editors
October 28, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes
“I’m working with a woman right now who’s the global head of data and analytics at a Fortune 10 company,” said Deepali Vyas, the sector head of AI and data at talent advisory ZRG. “She owns the entire AI roadmap, but her title, by the way, is just ‘data and analytics.’ They haven’t even updated the title yet.”
Such a distinction matters in a job market where employers are eager to hire anyone with AI expertise. There’s a shortage of such talent, and companies may be overlooking great hires who don’t tout their deep AI experience, as well as those with non-technical backgrounds who have the transferable skills and the willingness to learn. Many of these people are female. To stay competitive, companies need to carefully monitor the gender demographics in their AI workforce.
Women occupy only about one in four AI jobs worldwide, and they’re even more underrepresented in leadership, occupying just 15% of executive AI roles.
There’s a universal gap in AI use in the workplace too—as much as a 22% disparity in use among men and women, according to one study out of Harvard Business School. Authors of the report argue that the barriers are myriad across institutions, companies, and society. Some women opt out of using AI at work because they don’t want to be seen as cheating or incompetent, some have ethical concerns, and others don’t have enough exposure to AI tools in their roles to make regular use of them.
The imbalance threatens women’s earning potential, job mobility, and employability—and it threatens a company’s ability to build the AI-ready workforce it needs.
The Cost of the AI Gender Gap
AI—generative AI, more specifically—threatens to displace women more than it does men. Women are overrepresented in roles likely to be overtaken by AI, like bookkeeping and customer service. Unless women upskill, they risk becoming less competitive in the market. Plus, fewer women in AI roles mean that AI models can perpetuate bias by omitting gender-diverse perspectives. One study out of Johns Hopkins University found that prompts that include language commonly used by women produce less sophisticated responses from ChatGPT than ones that include language often used by men.
A new report from the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy found that there is a perception gap in which men are more likely to associate AI with curiosity and excitement while women associate it with concern and anxiety—skepticism that may be holding women back.
The AI gender gap exposes a critical problem. “The study didn’t find that women were less competent using AI, only that they were less confident, often thanks to a lack of support in their workplace, but also because they trust it less overall,” Nancy Gibbs, Lombard Director of the Shorenstein Center and one of the study’s principal investigators, told From Day One. “That skepticism is a valuable part of a critical debate over AI safety, guardrails, value and uses. When women’s voices are missing from the spaces where decisions are made, we have less cause to trust those decisions.”
RECENT EVENT HIGHLIGHTS
Employees want to know what a company stands for and whether its actions reflect its values. Courtni Hughes-Bochenek, SVP, head of people & culture at Zeller, says workers increasingly research companies before deciding where to work and whether to stay. “People really dig into the research. They want to know: Are you talking about things, and are you also living it?” | “We care for people so they can be their best” is Hyatt’s mission, guiding both colleague and customer relations through the same equation: empathy + action = care, said Kristin Oliver, the company’s CHRO. “How do you understand what people want, what they need, and then how do you act upon it? In doing those two things together, that’s how you show care for someone,” she said. |
One rule has been the driving force behind TIAA’s strategy: “We knew we didn’t want AI to happen to our associates; we wanted to bring them along,” said Claire Borelli, the company’s chief people officer. This meant developing a partnership between the organization’s HR and technology functions. “When you think about the impact that [AI] is going to have on human capital—with that comes the notion of how important internal mobility is.” | For Melissa Garza, chief HR officer at Powerfleet, embracing AI and supporting the people who use it go hand in hand. Garza says AI adoption differs from most workplace changes because it can threaten how people see themselves. That makes psychological safety the first consideration in any rollout. She recommends asking employees a direct question: “What are you worried about that you haven’t said out loud yet?” |
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Upcoming Webinars
October 29
A benefits package now has to work for a 24-year-old, a new parent, someone managing a chronic condition and someone five years from retirement. Most well-being programs are designed for the middle of that distribution and quietly fail at both ends. The result is a program that appears reasonably utilized in aggregate but barely reaches the people who stand to gain the most from it. In this session, Nutrium will share how health needs shift across working life, why generic programs under-serve both the youngest and the oldest cohorts, and how a clinically-led benefit can adapt by life stage rather than asking every employee to fit the same design.
November 3
As companies look beyond their markets for talent, building a global workforce can unlock new skills and new perspectives, but it also introduces a new layer of complexity for HR leaders and managers. In this session, we’ll explore how HR leaders can build a global workforce that is both compliant and connected, whether they are hiring their first international employee or scaling across markets. We’ll look at how to identify the right markets and talent, create a consistent employee experience, manage the operational and compliance challenges of a distributed workforce, and explore the tools needed to operate and scale globally.
November 4
HR leaders increasingly understand the potential of AI. The harder questions are more practical: Where should you start? Which work should you automate first? And how do you build AI that reflects the policies, processes, and judgment unique to your organization? The answer may already exist inside the work your HR team has completed. Historical cases, tickets, emails, policies, and other records provide a rich blueprint for understanding what HR teams actually do—not just what a process map says they do. In this session, we’ll share a practical approach to using that history to accelerate AI adoption.
November Continued & Beyond
Sponsor Spotlight: LOCAL
Change is a regular part of business, and sometimes adapting to new circumstances requires a company to overhaul its entire business model. Executives may spend months rethinking operations, products, and brand identity. But once the plan is finalized and presented to managers and workers, they may be tempted to consider the job done. Neil Bedwell, president of LOCAL, says that this is a mistake. Unveiling the plan is really only the beginning, he said during a thought leadership spotlight at From Day One’s Chicago HR conference. Read the full story here.
Sponsor Spotlight: Active Release Techniques
As AI tools are used more often and technology changes, HR leaders are tasked with navigating this change, which is more organizational than technological. “What we want to help you answer today is how do you overcome the growing employee mistrust and anxiety that’s a result of all of that change,” said Jen Mosher, marketing manager at Active Release Techniques (ART). “And the answer is to build a strategy that focuses on blending both technology and culture, and one that really puts your people at the center.” Read the full story here.
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