Key Takeaways
- Women’s jobs are disproportionately exposed to generative AI, with 86 % of the occupations most at risk (administrative, cash‑handling, back‑office) held by women, according to a Brookings Institution study.
- Despite this heightened exposure, women remain severely under‑represented in AI development: only 22 % of AI‑related jobs worldwide are held by women, and they occupy less than 14 % of senior leadership positions in the field (Interface think‑tank).
- Grass‑roots initiatives such as Women Applying AI and AI‑Powered Women aim to close the influence gap by providing hands‑on training, networking, and forums for discussing ethical AI use.
- These groups emphasize practical skill‑building (“vibe coding,” presentation‑design AI tools, Openclaw virtual assistants) while also advocating for safeguards against biased outcomes—e.g., AI that inadvertently favors white patients over Black patients in health‑care diagnostics.
- Leaders like Luda Kopeikina (former GE executive, VC partner) and Felicia Newhouse (AI‑Powered Women founder) stress that women must move from being “adjacent” to the AI transition to being “at the center of it,” leveraging both technical fluency and leadership to shape responsible AI deployment.
Overview of the Gender Imbalance in AI Impact
Recent research cited by journalist Aaron Pressman highlights a stark paradox: while women are far more likely to hold jobs that generative AI threatens, they have minimal say in how those technologies are designed and deployed. A January Brookings Institution report found that 86 percent of the workers in the roles most vulnerable to AI‑driven disruption are women, encompassing administrative assistants, cashiers, and back‑office staff. In contrast, women constitute only 22 percent of AI‑related jobs worldwide and hold less than 14 percent of senior leadership positions in the sector, according to Interface think‑tank data. Felicia Newhouse, founder of the AI‑Powered Women network, summed up the structural issue: “Women are … still underrepresented in the technical, the capital, the decision‑making layers that are shaping how AI is built and deployed. That creates a structural imbalance of higher exposure and lower influence.”
Women Applying AI: A Community‑Driven Response
Luda Kopeikina, a former GE executive turned managing partner at Noventra Ventures, co‑founded Women Applying AI to address precisely that imbalance. The organization describes its mission as “a movement to provide the keys to the kingdom for women to actually lead with AI everywhere, in work, in life.” At a recent Boston meetup held at the High Street Market, roughly 200 women gathered over rosé and chardonnay to network, exchange ideas, and demystify AI tools. One founder demonstrated how she built an entire website using “vibe coding”—a trend where AI generates code from natural‑language prompts—without hiring a programmer. Another attendee praised Gamma, an AI‑powered presentation‑design app, for accelerating her workflow.
Kopeikina noted that the group’s virtual and in‑person events have already attracted more than 1,000 members nationwide. Beyond skill acquisition, participants stress the need to understand AI’s societal implications and to guard against unethical applications. As entrepreneur coach Rebecca Moore warned, “Things are happening so fast … there need to be more guardrails before AI is just making all the decisions itself.”
Ethical Concerns and Real‑World Examples
The conversation frequently turned to concrete examples of AI bias. Pressman reported that an AI diagnostic assistant adopted by several hospitals was later found to favor treatment of white patients over sicker Black patients, a disparity traced back to training data that reflected historic inequities in medical care. In response, projects like Boston‑based Clairity are attempting to mitigate such harms by curating more diverse and accurate datasets for breast‑cancer risk prediction.
Giselle Ventura, a biotech professional who attended an online AI‑for‑job‑search workshop, shared how hearing peers discuss their failures and vulnerable moments made her feel “not alone.” Such testimonials underscore the emotional dimension of up‑skilling: women often confront not only technical hurdles but also confidence barriers when navigating a rapidly shifting job market.
Hands‑On Learning: From Openclaw to Hackathons
Women Applying AI emphasizes a learn‑by‑doing philosophy. Beth Rochefort, a learning technology specialist who was laid off from Northeastern University, recounted a recent hackathon at Microsoft’s Cambridge office where she and fellow members explored Openclaw, an AI virtual assistant capable of executing complex computer tasks. Rochefort highlighted a practical tip she picked up: “Set up Openclaw on a Microsoft server instead of on your own computer, to prevent the sometimes mistake‑prone AI program from accidentally deleting files or messing up settings.”
She added, “I have seen so many women of a certain age being laid off and eliminated, and a lot of them are in this group … They’re all sitting here trying to figure out, ‘How do I keep my skills up to date, how do I reinvent myself?’” The group’s Slack channels, virtual workshops, and in‑person meetups provide a continuous pipeline for members to experiment, troubleshoot, and share best practices across sectors such as biotech, finance, and marketing.
Parallel Efforts: AI‑Powered Women and Broader Ecosystem
Felicia Newhouse’s AI‑Powered Women pursues a similar goal but with a for‑profit model. Newhouse, who holds a doctorate in transformational learning from Lesley University and has decades of product‑development experience, is building a two‑day conference at MIT and an online learning platform featuring themed series like “Mastery Mondays,” “Tooling Tuesdays,” and “Wellness Wednesdays.” Her events have drawn over 1,000 in‑person attendees and thousands more online.
Newhouse’s framing mirrors Kopeikina’s: “Women are not adjacent to the transition; they’re at the center of it.” Both leaders stress that merely learning to use AI tools is insufficient; women must also grasp the broader economic and ethical stakes to steer the technology toward equitable outcomes.
The ecosystem also includes national programs such as Technovation, founded by Tara Chklovski, which offers AI education and startup competitions for young women in Silicon Valley. As private and public investment in AI swells—hundreds of billions of dollars annually—the demand for widespread, inclusive literacy only intensifies.
Vision for the Future
Kopeikina closed the Boston meetup with a rallying cry: “We are living the future and it’s incumbent on all of us to stand up and be counted and use it, apply it, share it with the rest … It’s economic power, it’s tremendous influence. So we kind of have to.” Her personal trajectory—from a student at St. Petersburg University in the 1970s, through telecom research at GTE, leadership roles at GE, a publicly traded software firm, a biofuel startup, and a visiting scholar stint at MIT Sloan—illustrates how persistence and mentorship can carve space for women in male‑dominated tech arenas.
Prominent female figures already shaping AI—such as Daniela Rus (MIT CSAIL), Mira Murati (founder of Thinking Machines), and Daniela Amodei (president and co‑founder of Anthropic)—show that leadership is possible, yet they remain exceptions rather than the norm. The grassroots movements highlighted here aim to expand that pool, ensuring that women not only adapt to AI’s advances but also help design, govern, and benefit from the technology that will define the next decade of work and society.
All quoted passages are drawn from the original article by Aaron Pressman, as cited in the summary.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/05/07/business/artificial-intelligence-women-boston-culture/