Every year, International Women's Day needs a thing. A subject. Something to give the panels a frame, the campaigns a hook, the industry a reason to feel like it showed up. Some years it's pay. Some years it's representation. Some years it's the blunt, exhausting reality of building a career while simultaneously running a household, raising children, and being expected to make none of it look difficult.
This year, the subject was never in doubt. We are deep in an AI groundhog day, and the research handed the narrative over on a plate. A Harvard Business School meta-analysis of 18 studies, covering more than 140,000 people across 25 countries, found women have 22% lower odds of using generative AI than men. Federal Reserve data puts it more simply: half of men use generative AI tools, compared to a third of women. Two things no marketing industry IWD conference can resist - AI and a gender gap. The panels were always going to happen. The concern is genuine. The instinct to fix it is also genuine. But the framing - that this is a confidence problem, a literacy problem, a fix-the-women problem - is where it goes wrong.
Because the gap is real. But the diagnosis isn't.
Look at what women are being invited to catch up to. Last week, Block laid off 40% of its workforce. The stated reason: AI has made the company so productive it needs significantly fewer people to operate. Across industries, organisations are deploying AI as a cost-cutting instrument and calling it vision. Eliminating the grunt work that turns junior people into senior people - severing the pipeline. Accelerating output without deepening judgment - making it harder to ask the right questions or notice when something's gone wrong. Optimising the present while hollowing out the future - trading extraordinary H1 numbers for a significantly more brittle organisation moving forward.
If women are looking at that and feeling cautious, that isn't a deficit. That's good judgment.
Women have spent careers inside systems that rewarded fast, loud, and confident over considered, contextual, and complex - and watched, repeatedly, what that actually produces. The scepticism many bring to AI isn't unfamiliarity, it's a precise read of how new tools tend to get used by the people who move fastest to grab them. And it is not wrong.
The future currently being built with AI is not, to put it plainly, looking that great. It's extractive, optimised for short-term returns, and wrapped in the language of inevitability. The big AI players need you to believe the future is already written - that scepticism is a trivial matter, that the only rational move is to get on board with whatever they're selling. But inevitability is a story. And the people telling it benefit most from you believing it.
So before you let anyone tell you your hesitancy is the problem, look at who's in the room building this thing. 70% of the AI workforce is male - predominantly white, Western, educated at the same handful of universities, working within a few square miles of each other. And they’re not asking the hard questions. Whose version of progress is this? What are we championing as good business, and for whom? What happens to jobs, livelihoods, the tax base that funds schools and hospitals and public services - when the entities reshaping the economy don't pay into it? What do we hand our children, and what does it do to how they learn, think, create? Who gets hurt in the gap between the announcement and the outcome?
Those questions require a kind of intelligence that gets filed under soft skills - which is one of the great mislabellings of professional life. Reading systems. Holding complexity without forcing resolution. Seeing the second and third order consequences before the first order ones have landed. Understanding what's at stake for the people not present when the decisions get made. These are not soft. They are the hardest skills there are. And they are disproportionately the skills women have spent careers developing, often because they had no other choice.
They are also exactly what we need right now. Not to slow AI down. But to make sure that when it moves fast, it moves in a direction worth going.
The future doesn't have to look like Block's workforce announcement. It doesn't have to mean speed without judgment, efficiency without wisdom, progress that hollows out everything it touches. That future is a choice - and currently it's being made by a very small group of people, with a very particular set of blind spots.
The only way that changes is if the people with the clearest read on what's wrong stop watching from the outside.
Conscientious objection is one strategy. But you don't change what's being built by refusing to touch it. And I'm not suggesting Sheryl Sandberg lean-in energy here - that was always bollocks. This is something harder and more consequential. It's getting close enough to the machine to know where to put the spanner, where to break it open, and where to rebuild it into something worth having.
This International Women's Day, ignore the panels telling you to overcome your hesitancy, to catch up, to close the gap. Your hesitancy is not the problem. Wielded with intention, it is the most valuable thing you can bring to this moment. Get in. Explore. Build. But keep your caution close, your questions sharp, your bullshit detector firmly on.
The world doesn't need more people racing toward an AI future without stopping to ask what kind of future it actually is.
It needs the women who are hesitating. Who are looking at what's being built and feeling something is wrong.
They're right. Now it's time to do something about it.
Zoe Scaman is a strategist, writer, and adviser. Founder of Bodacious. CSO at 77X.
