Global data and documented cases reveal the cost of women’s absence from the rooms where AI decisions are made.
TechDiversity Foundation has today launched the Govern the Future Scholarship Programme, opening sponsorship places that fund women’s participation in the AI Governance Practitioners Programme, designed and led by Dr Kobi Leins, one of the country’s most established voices on responsible AI.
The launch responds to two converging realities: a global workforce in which women remain significantly underrepresented in AI roles and decision-making positions, and a growing body of documented cases showing what happens when AI is designed, deployed, and governed without diverse voices in the room.
“AI does not invent the problems we see in deployed systems,” said Luli Adeyemo, Executive Director of TechDiversity Foundation. “It inherits them, from the data, the assumptions, and the rooms in which design and procurement decisions get made. Govern the Future is built to put more women into those governance conversations, not as developers, but as the practitioners who ask the harder questions earlier.”
The numbers that forced the launch
According to the World Economic Forum, women make up just 25 to 30 per cent of the global AI workforce, and hold less than 15 per cent of executive AI roles. The Forum’s 2025 Global Gender Gap Report estimates 123 years before the world reaches full gender parity at the current pace. WEF analysis has also found that 33.7 per cent of women work in occupations being disrupted by AI, compared with 25.5 per cent of men, meaning the people most affected by AI deployment are also least represented in the decisions about how it is deployed.
In Australia, the picture is consistent. Women remain underrepresented in technical AI roles, in AI leadership positions, and, most critically for TechDiversity’s work, in the governance forums where AI procurement, deployment, and oversight decisions are made.
“These numbers are the reason we have launched Govern the Future now, and not next year,” Adeyemo said. “The decisions being made about AI right now will shape the next decade. If the people in the rooms making those decisions continue to represent the same narrow band of perspectives that built the previous generation of technology, the next generation will inherit the same blind spots, at greater speed and scale.”
The evidence
The AI Governance Practitioners Programme grounds its teaching in real-world cases. Practitioners work through documented failures, and successes, drawn from a range of sectors. The cases include:
- Healthcare and clinical research. Women were officially excluded from many medical trials in jurisdictions including the United States until 1991. The datasets that AI medical tools learn from inherit that exclusion, with documented downstream consequences for diagnostic accuracy in women’s health.
- Aged care. Australian cases of algorithm-driven decisions in aged care assessment have demonstrated how automated tools, deployed without governance scrutiny, can produce outcomes that affected communities and frontline professionals had predicted but had no formal way to challenge.
- Consumer services. Air Canada was held legally accountable in 2024 after its AI chatbot provided a passenger with incorrect bereavement fare policy. The case is now widely taught as an example of how organisations cannot disclaim responsibility for the outputs of AI systems they deploy.
- Hiring and employment. Algorithmic hiring tools have repeatedly been shown to encode gender bias, screening out qualified women candidates based on patterns derived from historically biased recruitment data.
- Mental health. AI chatbots are increasingly placed in front of users in crisis, often deployed without consultation with clinicians or the communities they will most affect. Dr Leins has co-authored peer-reviewed work specifically on the ethical issues raised by mental health chatbots.
The programme also examines the positive side of the ledger. AI has been used to successfully challenge unfair speeding fines, expose wage disparities that would otherwise have remained invisible, and surface patterns in administrative data that human review alone could not have caught. Governance, as the programme teaches it, is not about restricting AI. It is about steering it.
“What separates the harms from the wins, in every one of these cases, is the same factor,” Adeyemo said. “Who was consulted, and who was in the room, when the decisions got made.”
The scholarship
The Govern the Future Scholarship Programme funds women’s participation in the AI Governance Practitioners Programme, a three-module qualification structured around the international standards ISO 42001 (AI management systems) and ISO 42005 (AI impact assessment):
- Module 1: AI Fundamentals. Online, self-paced. Open now.
- Module 2: Governance and Policy. A full-day in-person workshop with Dr Kobi Leins. Sydney, 31 July 2026, or Melbourne, 14 August 2026.
- Module 3: Practical Implementation. Live online sessions with Dr Leins, September 2026.
Each sponsorship funds ten scholarship places, which can be allocated to women within the sponsoring organisation, or opened to applicants from the wider TechDiversity community.
The call for sponsors
The Foundation is inviting Australian organisations across healthcare, financial services, government, technology, education, and any sector deploying AI in customer or service-affecting decisions to sponsor scholarship places.
“This is a measurable, defensible investment in women in AI governance,” Adeyemo said. “Sponsorship aligns with ESG, DEI, and UN Sustainable Development Goal commitments. The institutions that will be ahead of this in twelve months will be the ones investing in capability now.”
About TechDiversity Foundation
TechDiversity Foundation is an Australian not-for-profit working to ensure that the next decade of AI is shaped by a fuller spectrum of voices. The Foundation’s work spans original research (including the Tech Reflects study, which identified the “influence gap” between women’s representation in technology roles and their presence in technology decision-making rooms), education (the AI Governance Practitioners Programme), and recognition (the annual TechDiversity Awards, MC’d in 2026 by Tracey Spicer AM, author of Man-Made: How the Bias of the Past is Being Built into the Future).
For sponsorship enquiries and full programme details: Web: tech-diversity.com.au/ai-governance-scholarship Email: jen@bestcasescenario.com.au
Media Contact
- Jen Murray Content and Marketing Lead, TechDiversity Foundation Email: jen@bestcasescenario.com.au
- Luli Adeyemo Executive Director, TechDiversity Foundation LinkedIn: Luli Adeyemo
