‘Alpha male’ AI world shuts out women, says computing professor Wendy Hall

Artificial intelligence could change the world but the scarcity of women in the emerging sector will undermine promises of inclusive technology, senior computer scientist Wendy Hall told AFP on Friday.

Hall, a professor at the University of Southampton in England who is known for his pioneering research on web systems, said the gender imbalance has been serious for a long time.

“All CEOs are men,” the 73-year-old said, describing the situation at a major AI summit in New Delhi this week as “incredibly awful.”

“It’s completely male-dominated, and they don’t understand that that means 50 percent of the population is not actually involved in the conversations.”

Gender bias “is baked into everything, because they didn’t think about it when they were developing their products,” Hall said.

He was speaking in an interview at the AI ​​Impact Summit, where dozens of governments are expected to put forward a common vision on how to tackle the promises and pitfalls of generative AI.

Pushing for India to become a global AI power, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Thursday that advanced computing systems “must become a tool for inclusion and empowerment”.

But when she posed on stage for a photo with tech industry luminaries, there were 13 men and just one woman: Joelle Pineau, a former Meta researcher who now serves as chief AI officer at Cohere.

A similar story played out during another photo opportunity with world leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron and Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Many studies have shown how generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini reflect stereotypes contained in the large chunks of text and images they are trained on.

“We are in a biased world, so training is done on biased data,” Hall said.

A 2024 UNESCO study found that major language models described women in domestic roles more often than men, and that women were more likely to be associated with words such as “salary” and “career”.

As tech companies try to counter these ingrained machine biases, women have found themselves targeted by AI tools in other ways.

Many countries moved to ban Elon Musk’s Grok AI tool this year after it sparked global outrage over its ability to create sexualized deepfakes depicting real people, mostly women, in tight clothing.

Hall, a longtime advocate for women in tech, said things “haven’t really improved that much” since she started the business decades ago.

“The situation is getting worse in artificial intelligence.”

Very few women choose to study computer science in the first place, Hall said, and then “once you get to the next grade, women fail.”

She added that women-led startups “don’t get the investment that men do” and many are “fed up.”

Women also “drop out of school because they don’t want to be part of that alpha male world.”

Hall, who wrote her first article about the lack of women in the computer industry in the late 1980s, said she encountered “all kinds of obstacles” throughout her career.

“I had to keep going, I had to be strong, I had to have good mentors. And yes, there were many times I wanted to give up.”

She was crowned a woman in 2009 and has also served as a senior advisor on artificial intelligence to the British government and the United Nations.

But at her first job interview at a university nearly fifty years ago, she recalled being “told I couldn’t get the job because I was a woman” by an all-male panel.

“I was supposed to teach math to engineers, and they said I couldn’t control a class of male engineers as a young woman.”

Hall said she was inspired by New Delhi, although she hasn’t noticed an increase in the number of women entering the field overall.

“The great thing about this conference is the young people here,” he said.

“There are so many young women from India here and they are all brimming with opportunities.”

It was published – 21 February 2026 10:17 IST