UN Women has launched a global Digital, Innovation and AI Hub to put gender equality at the heart of digital transformation.
The hub will unite governments, tech firms, researchers and women’s rights groups to ensure AI systems reflect women’s realities, counter gender bias and online violence.
It will also embed gender-responsive policies in emerging technologies worldwide.
UN Women has launched a new global Digital, Innovation and AI Hub dedicated to gender equality, warning that women remain largely excluded from the design and governance of technologies that are reshaping work, public services and rights.
The platform will bring together researchers, governments, technology companies, AI experts and women’s rights organisations to help shape artificial intelligence and digital transformation in ways that benefit women and girls, UN Women said.
The launch comes as world leaders gather in New York for the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly, where AI is expected to feature prominently in discussions on economic transformation, the future of work, development, warfare, and international peace and security.
UN Women said women and girls, and the implications of technological change for their rights and empowerment, remained largely absent from these debates.
Men hold nearly eight in 10 AI jobs and almost nine in 10 senior leadership positions shaping the technology, according to the agency.
“The artificial intelligence systems we build today will shape how we live and work tomorrow,” said Sima Bahous, UN Women’s executive director. “If women are missing from their design and governance, we risk carrying the inequalities of the present into the future.”
The agency said women were already experiencing the consequences of AI systems that failed to reflect their realities. A global analysis of 133 AI systems found that 44% demonstrated gender bias, UN Women said.
Nearly one in four women human rights defenders, activists and journalists surveyed by UN Women also reported experiencing AI-assisted online violence.
The new hub aims to generate evidence on how emerging technologies affect women and girls. It will support member states in developing gender-responsive digital and AI policies, while working with technology companies to embed gender equality principles into the design and governance of technology.
UN Women said the hub would strengthen the UN system’s capacity to act on AI and digital governance, while giving women and women’s rights organisations a stronger voice in shaping policies, rules and technologies.
“AI can deepen gender inequality or help overcome it. That is a human choice,” Ms Bahous said. She said those choices were being made now by engineers, companies, investors and governments.
UN Women said equality in AI was not only about representation but also about power, because the technology was already helping reshape economic, social and political systems.
The Digital, Innovation and AI Hub forms part of UN Women’s broader work on gender equality and women’s empowerment in the context of rapid technological change.
The agency said its work would contribute to international efforts to ensure that digital transformation and AI support inclusive and sustainable development and respect human rights.
