The first time a venture fund assumed I was an executive assistant for my male cofounder, I laughed. The second time it happened, I responded with a curt clarification, “I’m actually the CEO.” By the third time, I started to wonder why the broader tech industry seemed unable to process the idea of a female executive in generative AI.
While it might be easy to scapegoat the so-called “pipeline problem,” arguing there simply aren’t enough women making their way through the maze of academia and industry, the percentage of women pursuing careers in artificial intelligence aligns fairly closely to the overall trends in STEM. In other words, women appear to be equally underrepresented in AI as they are in other STEM fields.
