Women, A Vital Link Missing From India's AI Revolution

A woman in a village in Bundelkhand opens an artificial intelligence chatbot on her smartphone. She wants to know whether the dizziness she has been experiencing during pregnancy is serious. She speaks naturally in Bundeli, the language she has used all her life. The chatbot responds in formal Hindi before slipping into English. She struggles to understand the advice, closes the application and decides to visit the nearest health centre instead.

Artificial intelligence did not fail because the technology was inadequate. It failed because it did not understand her language, her context, or her reality.

As India races to become a global leader in artificial intelligence, this invisible exclusion deserves far more attention than it currently receives. The debate has largely centred on investments, innovation, semiconductor capacity, and computing power. Far less attention has been paid to a basic question: Whose voices are teaching artificial intelligence to understand India?

The answer has profound implications for women.

India's AI story is full of contradictions. According to the Stanford University AI Index Report, Indian women have the highest AI skill penetration in the world, scoring 1.91, ahead of women in the United States and Germany. The statistic should have signalled a quiet revolution. It suggests that Indian women are acquiring the skills needed to shape one of the world's most transformative technologies.

Yet the celebration ends there.

A report by venture capital firm Kalaari Capital shows that women constitute only about 20 per cent of India's active artificial intelligence and machine learning workforce. The country is producing AI-skilled women but is failing to retain, promote, and empower them where decisions about technology are actually made.

This is not merely a question of workplace diversity; it is about the quality of technology itself.

Artificial intelligence learns from data, but it is also shaped by those who collect that data, design the algorithms, and decide which problems deserve technological solutions. When women are missing from these decisions, technology inherits the same social biases that society has struggled with for decades.

The consequences are rarely dramatic. They appear quietly in everyday life.

An AI-powered health assistant may not adequately understand the concerns of a pregnant woman speaking in Bundeli or Bhojpuri. A woman farmer seeking crop advice in Awadhi may receive incomplete or inaccurate responses because local dialects remain poorly represented in training data. A survivor of domestic violence looking for legal information may find that automated systems cannot interpret the nuances of her language or circumstances. An elderly widow trying to understand a pension scheme may abandon a digital service because it does not recognise the way she speaks.

In each of these situations, technology does not simply fail to answer a question; it excludes the person asking it. A Bundeli-speaking woman from a dominant caste may still find her words recognised; a Dalit woman speaking the same dialect often does not. Artificial intelligence learns silence exactly where society has already practised it.

Language is emerging as one of artificial intelligence's biggest blind spots. India's linguistic diversity is extraordinary, yet AI systems are overwhelmingly trained in English and standardised Hindi. Women, particularly in rural India, are often more likely to communicate in regional dialects that remain largely invisible in digital datasets. If artificial intelligence cannot understand these voices, it cannot claim to serve everyone equally.

The irony is difficult to ignore. A country that has produced some of the world's most AI-skilled women is building AI systems that may not fully understand millions of ordinary Indian women.

Why does this contradiction persist? The answer lies beyond technology.

The pipeline narrows long before women enter AI laboratories. Fewer women pursue advanced STEM education, limiting the pool entering machine learning and data science. Those who do enter the profession confront another obstacle that no algorithm can solve—Time.

The attrition becomes particularly severe in the middle of their careers. The technology sector witnesses a significant drop in women's participation as marriage, motherhood, and caregiving responsibilities coincide with years critical for professional advancement. Many leave. Others remain but find leadership positions elusive.

Those who persevere often encounter less visible barriers. Hiring biases, questions about marriage or maternity plans, limited mentorship, and a shortage of women in senior AI leadership continue to shape career trajectories. Even entrepreneurship reflects this imbalance. Women-led AI startups receive only a fraction of venture capital funding, restricting the diversity of innovations entering India's technology ecosystem.

Initiatives such as AI Kiran, which aims to train one million women in artificial intelligence, are welcome. But training alone cannot dismantle structural inequalities. The evidence already shows that Indian women possess the skills. The greater challenge is creating workplaces, leadership pathways and investment ecosystems where those skills can flourish.

India's aspiration to become an AI superpower cannot be measured only by the number of models it develops or the billions invested in the sector. It must also be measured by whether technology understands the woman who speaks in Bundeli, Gondi, Kashmiri, Mizo, Santali or Bhojpuri with the same ease that it understands an engineer in Bengaluru speaking English.

Artificial intelligence is often described as the future. But every future reflects the values embedded in its design. If India's AI revolution is built without the voices, experiences, and leadership of women, it will reproduce the very inequalities that technology claims to overcome.

The real question, therefore, is not whether India will lead the world in artificial intelligence. It is whether the intelligence it creates will truly recognise the women whose lives it promises to transform.

The writer is a senior journalist. Views expressed are personal.

Published on: Sunday, June 28, 2026, 09:59 PM IST