Women represent only 22 percent of AI professionals globally. That single statistic captures a problem that UN Women has spent the past several years trying to address: the people building the systems that will shape the future do not reflect the diversity of the people those systems will affect. In response, UN Women has launched an ambitious set of programs to train women in AI and data science across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, while simultaneously deploying AI tools to advance gender equality on the ground.
The effort is not just about fairness in hiring. Research consistently shows that AI systems built without diverse teams encode gender bias, from facial recognition algorithms that misidentify women at higher rates to hiring tools that systematically downgrade female applicants. UN Women's argument is straightforward: if women are not in the room when these systems are designed, the systems will not serve them well.
Teaching the Next Generation to Code
The African Girls Can Code Initiative, launched by UN Women in partnership with the African Union and the International Telecommunication Union, has trained thousands of young women across the continent in programming, AI, and data science. The program targets girls between the ages of 17 and 25, offering intensive coding bootcamps followed by mentorship and internship placements with technology companies.
Beyond Africa, UN Women operates training centers in Kenya, India, Mexico, and Jordan. Each center adapts its curriculum to local needs. In India, the focus has been on AI applications for agriculture and healthcare, sectors where women make up a large share of the workforce but have little influence over the technology being introduced. In Jordan, the program prioritizes refugee women, providing both technical skills and pathways to remote employment in the global tech economy.
The scale is growing. What began as pilot programs with a few hundred participants has expanded to reach tens of thousands of women annually. Graduates are entering roles in data analysis, machine learning engineering, and AI product management at companies across the developing world.
AI as a Tool for Gender Equality
Training women in AI is one side of UN Women's strategy. The other is using AI directly to advance gender equality. One of the most impactful applications has been analyzing patterns of gender-based violence. By processing data from police reports, hospital records, and helpline calls, AI systems can identify geographic and temporal patterns that help governments target interventions more effectively. In several countries, this analysis has led to the reallocation of resources toward high-risk areas and the redesign of emergency response protocols.
UN Women has also developed AI tools to track progress on Sustainable Development Goal 5, which focuses on gender equality. These tools combine satellite imagery with survey data to measure indicators such as women's access to land, economic participation, and representation in decision-making bodies. The satellite data is particularly valuable in regions where traditional survey infrastructure is weak, providing near real-time insight into conditions on the ground.
Empowering Women Entrepreneurs
In many developing economies, women entrepreneurs face systemic barriers to accessing capital and markets. UN Women has supported the development of AI-powered platforms that connect women-owned businesses with microfinance institutions, matching borrowers to lenders based on business profiles, repayment capacity, and local market conditions. These platforms also provide market information, helping women entrepreneurs identify demand for their products and optimize pricing.
The results have been measurable. In East Africa, women using AI-assisted microfinance platforms have seen higher loan approval rates and lower default rates compared to traditional lending channels. The platforms reduce the bias that can creep into human lending decisions while also lowering the cost of loan processing, making smaller loans economically viable for financial institutions.
Setting the Rules for Gender-Responsive AI
UN Women has recognized that training and tools are not enough without the right governance frameworks. In partnership with the International Telecommunication Union and UNESCO, UN Women helped create ethics guidelines for gender-responsive AI. These guidelines call on governments and companies to audit AI systems for gender bias, ensure diverse representation in AI development teams, and include gender impact assessments in the design and deployment of automated decision-making systems.
The guidelines have been adopted as reference frameworks by several national AI strategies and have influenced procurement standards for AI systems used in public services. They represent an acknowledgment that technical solutions alone cannot fix structural inequality. The rules under which AI is built and deployed matter as much as the code itself.
The Road Ahead
The gender gap in AI remains vast. Moving from 22 percent to parity will take decades of sustained investment in education, mentorship, and workplace culture. But UN Women's approach offers a model for how to pursue that goal without waiting for the gap to close before acting. By training women in AI while simultaneously using AI to advance gender equality, the organization is working both sides of the problem at once.
The thousands of women who have graduated from UN Women's training programs are not just filling seats in the tech industry. They are bringing perspectives and priorities that shape what gets built, who it serves, and whose problems it solves. In a field that will define much of the coming century, that presence matters.
Sources: UN Women official reports on AI and gender equality; African Girls Can Code Initiative program data; ITU and UNESCO joint publications on gender-responsive AI ethics; World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Report 2025; UN Women SDG 5 monitoring framework documentation; Stanford HAI AI Index Report 2025 workforce diversity data.
