The Women Rewriting the Future of AI and Technology

There is a persistent myth about technology that it is neutral. That it emerges fully formed from labs and boardrooms, inevitable and untouched by the biases of the people building it. But technology has always reflected its architects. For decades, those architects were overwhelmingly male.

Women still make up just 28 per cent of the global STEM workforce. The gender gap in tech is neither new nor accidental. It is structural, embedded and slow to shift. Yet something material is changing. Since 2016, the proportion of women in technology roles has steadily increased, according to the World Economic Forum. At companies that define the direction of travel such as Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft, women now make up between 29 and 45 per cent of the workforce. The road to parity remains long, but women are no longer peripheral to innovation. Increasingly, they are shaping it.

What is notable about this moment is not simply representation. It is influence. Women are leading work in artificial intelligence, cloud computing, data analytics, cybersecurity and healthtech. They are not observing disruption. They are engineering it.

At Microsoft, principal engineering manager Manasi Sharma works at the intersection of data intensive web applications, microservices and AI powered enterprise systems. She played a pivotal role in developing the Microsoft Teams platform, driving extensibility while improving collaboration for millions of users. The challenge, she has said, was balancing technical complexity with user experience. It marked a turning point in her leadership journey, not simply because of scale, but because of culture.

For Sharma, innovation is inseparable from empowerment. Creating environments where teams feel confident to take ownership and experiment is central to how she leads. In a sector often defined by velocity and competition, that emphasis on trust is quietly radical. The future of AI will be shaped not only by code, but by the cultures in which it is written.

Layla Shaikley’s route into tech was less linear. After building robots at NASA and studying architecture at MIT, she co founded Wise Systems, an AI driven autonomous delivery startup focused on last mile logistics. She often credits a mentor who urged her, as a student, to overreach. Without a background in aerospace engineering, she applied for a NASA internship anyway. She got it, and the experience redirected her career towards technology.

Overreach, she suggests, is not recklessness but expansion. It is the refusal to self select out of rooms you have not yet been invited into. Today, as a Muslim American founder and host of the podcast Muslims Doing Things, Shaikley speaks openly about visibility and ambition in communities that are often underrepresented in tech. If ease of use predicts product adoption, as she argues, then access predicts participation. Widen the pathway and the pipeline begins to change.

In healthcare, Brigitte West is focused on a different kind of disruption. As product director at healthtech company DrDoctor, she is applying AI to one of the NHS’s most persistent operational challenges: missed appointments. Known as did not attends, they cost the health service an estimated one billion pounds each year. West’s Smart Centre project uses predictive analytics to identify patterns in patient behaviour, enabling proactive and personalised interventions.

The transformative potential of AI, she argues, lies not only in advanced diagnostics but in operational efficiency. Reducing empty appointment slots may not sound visionary, yet it is precisely this kind of system level intelligence that strengthens public infrastructure. Innovation, in this context, is about resilience.

Sylvia Acevedo’s career spans decades of technological evolution. A former rocket scientist who has worked at NASA, Apple, Dell and IBM, and who later served as CEO of Girl Scouts of the USA, she now sits on the boards of Qualcomm and Credo Technologies. Her vantage point is both historical and forward looking.

The world is being recreated around technology, she has said, and women and those of diverse backgrounds need the skills and confidence to be part of the world being built. From autonomous vehicles to advances in medicine, technology increasingly mediates daily life. To be absent from its creation is to be absent from power.

Skills, in turn, are infrastructure. Magda Jary spent sixteen years at Google, most recently as global head of cloud credentials and certifications, building the company’s portfolio of cloud and AI qualifications from zero to more than two million credentials worldwide. That expansion is not simply commercial. It is cultural. Credentialing shapes who feels fluent in emerging technologies and who does not.

What excites Jary most is the transformative power of learning to unlock human potential. In an era defined by automation anxiety, her focus is distinctly human. AI may optimise systems, but it is people who interpret, deploy and govern it.

The story of women in tech has long been framed as one of entry. Breaking in. Being the only one in the room. What feels different in 2025 is authorship. These women are not symbolic appointments. They are principal engineers, founders, product strategists and board members. They are designing collaboration platforms, autonomous logistics networks, healthcare systems and global skilling ecosystems.

Artificial intelligence and automation will reshape how we work, access care and participate in the economy. The question is no longer whether women belong in that transformation. It is how profoundly the transformation changes when they are integral to building it.