As the world marks yet another International Women’s Day on Saturday, the conversation revolves once more around progress made and hurdles yet to be overcome. Let’s face it: despite significant achievements in women’s rights, a vast reservoir of female potential remains untapped — especially in fields shaping the future, such as artificial intelligence and data science. But what if the accelerating fusion of natural intelligence with artificial intelligence — hybrid intelligence — could help increase quotas and dismantle the underpinning structural barriers that have put a lid on female flourishing? By combining women’s unique perspectives with the algorithmic power of AI, we can catalyze social transformations that benefit everyone.
Women are uniquely poised to champion a holistic approach that honors the unity of mind and body, self and society. In what follows, we examine how such an approach—powered by hybrid intelligence — can finally offer women and girls the space they have merited since humanity’s earliest days.
The Undervalued Half Of Human Potential
Historically, women’s voices have often been sidelined, limiting their roles in technology, governance, and cultural discourse. Even as scientific and technological revolutions reshaped the world, women’s contributions were frequently overlooked or wholly omitted. This omission has fueled a global STEM gender gap: women comprise only around 33% of researchers worldwide, with their representation in AI research remaining even lower.
That trend characterizes both research and the use of generative AI. Synthesizing data from 18 studies covering over 140,000 individuals worldwide, a 2025 study reveals that women are about 22% less likely than men to use GenAI tools — even after controlling for occupation, age, field of study, and location; web traffic analyses show that women comprise only 42% of ChatGPT users and 31% of Claude users.
As AI systems guide decisions in business and leisure, from education via healthcare to finance and beyond, the need for inclusive leadership has never been more acute. Women’s experiences and evolutionary skillsets uniquely prepare them to ensure that AI solutions serve all of humanity rather than a narrow subset.
What Is Hybrid Intelligence?
Hybrid Intelligence arises from the intentional fusion of natural and artificial intelligences. Rather than looking for ways machines can replace humans, it capitalizes on the systematic interplay of both, using the artificial arsenal to enhance what humans do best and enjoy doing. On the human side, we have innate cognitive abilities like critical thinking, intuition, emotional literacy, and moral reasoning. On the AI side, we have algorithmic power capable of sifting through massive datasets, detecting patterns invisible to the naked eye, and automating repetitive tasks at scale. HI goes beyond the debate of human or machine by emphasizing double literacy:
Algorithmic Literacy: Understanding how and why AI systems operate and where they can fail or carry hidden bias.
Human Literacy: A holistic grasp of brain and body, self and society — encompassing awareness of the multiple dimensions that shape human experiences and expressions in society.
This synthesis becomes even more potent when women lead. As a result of multitasking in family and professional settings, women tend to have highly developed skills in managing complexity. By engaging with AI tools that streamline specific tasks, women can focus more energy on creativity, community-building, and strategic thinking. In this sense, hybrid intelligence not only augments women’s roles but can also dismantle an outdated environment in which technology is relegated to a male-dominated realm.
Why Women Are Uniquely Positioned To Lead In A Hybrid World
Many women develop distinctive traits from juggling social, familial, and professional roles — such as compassion, collaboration, creativity, and nuanced community awareness. These qualities are especially valuable in an automation-driven. Yes, machines can handle impressive data processing and pattern recognition at scale, yet humans contribute emotional resonance, holistic thinking, and ethical judgment. Beyond the quality of life, this also boosts organizational performance: companies with higher female leadership are more innovative and productive, underscoring women’s measurable impact on outcomes.
Despite these strengths, women remain underrepresented in technology; the World Economic Forum warned as early as 2022 of widening gender gaps in AI and machine learning. Ironically, many soft skills that are stereotypically associated with women — like empathy, consensus-building, and broad-perspective thinking — are now at a premium. Female leaders often balance multiple responsibilities—caregiver, mentor, and professional — giving them a deep understanding of how technology affects entire ecosystems, not just individual users or profits. Systemic awareness is vital in AI-driven fields especially those that touch on healthcare and education, where diverse perspectives are needed to ensure solutions genuinely serve the greater good.
The 4 A’s Of Hybrid Intelligence
Four A’s are beneficial to remember when we seek to understand why women’s contributions matter so much in a landscape marked by the rise of artificial influence: Attitude, Approach, Ability and Ambition. These assets define how we blend human and machine intelligence to maximize our hybrid power:
Attitude
Women’s heightened awareness of social structures can help identify subtle biases encoded in AI systems. This fosters accountability for how algorithmic outcomes affect marginalized groups.
Approach
Women’s experiences balancing multiple domains can help to bring a more mindful approach to AI usage; from the co-creation of solutions that avoid digital overload to the alignment of an aspiration to values with the requirement of business viability.
Ability
Bridging technical know-how with emotional and social intelligence is a strength many women bring. Encouraging more women to pursue STEM careers, or build advanced AI skills, as initiatives like Women in AI do, can supercharge innovation.
Ambition
Women’s leadership often marries altruism with authenticity — key traits to ensure that AI transformations are guided by ethics and respect for human autonomy.
By embracing these four pillars, women can help society adopt a holistic approach to AI that harnesses computational might but remains grounded in compassion, justice, and empowerment.
Examples Of Women-Shaped Hybrid Intelligence
Healthcare & Telemedicine
Female-led tech startups are creating AI-driven systems for remote diagnosis and personalized patient care, where empathy and frontline experience translate into user-centric designs. For instance, Maven Clinic, founded by Kate Ryder, provides virtual healthcare with a strong focus on women and families, integrating maternal health modules that ensure pregnant women or new mothers have immediate medical guidance — an area often overlooked by male-centric R&D teams.
Education & Skills Training
Women entrepreneurs in ed-tech blend AI-powered tutoring with social-emotional learning to offer more holistic instruction. For example, M-Shule, co-founded by Claire Mongeau, uses adaptive learning technology to support students in underserved communities. A female founder might not only prioritize boosting reading speed but also emphasize empathy, reflection, and discussion — ensuring AI tools foster real-world engagement, not just academic performance.
Financial Inclusion
In microfinance and community banking, female-led initiatives leverage AI to assess loan risks in regions with limited financial services. Tala, founded by Shivani Siroya, blends large-scale data analysis with relationship-based lending methods that incorporate local knowledge. This dual approach creates robust credit models that account for both lived realities and numerical data, ensuring underserved populations gain fair access to financial resources.
Such examples confirm that when women combine personal experience, empathy, and social insight with AI’s algorithmic horsepower, they deliver solutions that resonate more widely and effectively.
A Path Forward: Fostering Women’s HI Leadership
To fully realize the potential of hybrid intelligence — and to offer women and girls the space they deserve — structural and cultural shifts are needed. Four ways to get started:
Attitude – Mentoring and Sponsorship: Initiatives that pair aspiring female data scientists or AI researchers with industry mentors can accelerate skill acquisition and confidence.
Approach – Policy Interventions: Concrete measures, such as targets for female representation in R&D or funded scholarships for AI training can serve to close the technology gender gap more quickly. Governments and organizations should enact policies that systematically promote women’s participation in AI projects.
Ability – Community Education: Grassroots workshops can help women see AI as accessible and relevant to their daily challenges, from delegating routine tasks at work to optimizing a household budget. Local-level empowerment matters to ensure that female visionaries and coders are woven into the broader social fabric that influences AI.
Ambition – Championing Double Literacy for all: Encouraging women and men alike to cultivate algorithmic and human literacy fosters a more ethical, inclusive approach to AI. Educational curricula that blend emotional intelligence and coding fundamentals can prepare the next generation to wield hybrid intelligence responsibly and benefit everyone.
Expanding Humanity’s Horizon
The complementarity of natural and artificial intelligence presents an unprecedented opportunity for women and girls to claim the space that has long been denied. By bringing empathetic leadership, holistic thinking, and ethical grounding to AI’s computational power, females can help society adopt a hybrid intelligence mindset where technology expands possibilities for all, instead of catering to the selected few.
International Women’s Day 2025 offers a beautiful opportunity to acknowledge that women’s underutilized perspectives are worth far more than a footnote to the story of AI and big data. They are integral to shaping a future that honors the full spectrum of human experience — aspirations, emotion, intellect and body, in the community and all over this planet. If all humans on the spectrum of humanity get a seat on the table, we actually have a chance to shape artificial general intelligence in ways that break redundant glass ceilings and use the fragments as a foundation to uplift humans.
