It was either start a blog or go insane.
I've been awake most nights for months now. Actually that's a lie — let's start this with honesty. For months I've been both worrying about AI and excited about it and desperate not to miss the opportunity it could give me. Which is why I need to share, I need to find a network, and I need to speak to others about it who are frankly, not AI.
The dream is to make likeminded friends. The worst case scenario is that I continue to learn while I write. And what's in it for you? I'll do the late night prompts. I'll ask the dumb questions. And I'll share everything here — in plain English, because that's the only language I actually understand any of this in.
So. AI and women.
Here's what I actually found when I went looking properly.
The people selling inevitability — the Sam Altmans, the tech evangelists — want you to feel like a spectator. Like this is happening to you and the only question is whether you're fast enough to keep up. But the more responsible voices — the Nobel Prize economists, the researchers without billion dollar valuations riding on your panic — are saying something different. The window is open. There is still time to act. But not forever.
And here's the part that nobody is saying loudly enough.
The disruption isn't gender neutral. And the people building it aren't asking why.
The people building AI are mostly men. The people governing it are mostly men. The people deciding what it prioritises, what it values, what it gets wrong — mostly men.
We all know Elon Musk. We all know Sam Altman.
Can you name a single powerful woman shaping where this goes?
Actually — you can. You just haven't been introduced yet.
Meet the women at the table.
The company behind Claude — one of the most safety-focused AI systems in the world. Before Anthropic she was VP of Operations at OpenAI. In early 2026 she helped steer a $30 billion funding round pushing Anthropic's valuation to $380 billion. She is arguably the most powerful woman in AI right now. Most people have never heard of her name. That tells you everything.
anthropic.com →She created ImageNet — the dataset that made modern AI possible. She built the field. Now she's running World Labs, which secured over $1 billion in funding by early 2026. Her entire life's work has been about making AI that serves humans rather than replacing them. She is spending her influence making sure it doesn't eat us alive.
worldlabs.ai →MIT researcher. Poet. Activist. Her book Unmasking AI is the most important thing you can read about how AI gets women — and particularly women of colour — wrong. She proved that facial recognition software couldn't accurately identify her face until she held up a white mask. She turned that into a movement. If you only follow one person on this list, follow Joy.
ajl.org →One of the most important AI ethics researchers in the world. She was fired from Google after raising concerns about bias in large language models — the same models that now power most of the AI tools you use daily. She didn't go quietly. She founded the DAIR Institute to do the work Google wouldn't let her do. She is proof that the people who tell the truth about AI pay a price for it. And she keeps telling it anyway.
dair-institute.org →Former barrister and judge. She advised the UK and US governments on AI governance and was the first Head of AI at the World Economic Forum. She is in the rooms where the rules are being written. She is one of the reasons those rules have any humanity in them at all.
goodtechadvisory.com →The most accessible voice on what AI means for our careers, our families, and our futures. Canadian futurist, 11-time UN speaker, founder of WAYE where over 20,000 people tune in daily. If you saw the Oprah podcast clip recently — that was her. She explains the most complicated shift of our generation in language that actually makes sense. Start here if you're new to all of this.
@sineadbovell →These women exist. They're extraordinary. They're fighting for us in rooms we don't know about.
Now we know who's at the table.
Support them. Share them.
And let's figure out how the rest of us get there too.
Next time: the economists who say the window is open but closing — and what that actually means for us.