AI Hates Women

As AI rises, women’s rights decline. This isn’t coincidental, it’s by design. Innovation has always been used to abuse women, here’s why and what to do about it.

Liberation is technology’s great promise. The hope is that automated decision-making, stripped of human bias, combined with unprecedented access to knowledge, will usher in a new era of equality. A non-gendered, logical, and impartial AI, will finally deliver gender-based justice.

Only, as AI advances, women’s rights decline.

According to UN Women, global gender disparities in sexual and reproductive rights, employment equity, political representation, and voting access are worsening. In the US, once a beacon of progressive rights, nearly 50% of all women will experience domestic violence, 25% will experience sexual assault, and almost 4 women will be murdered each day by their partners.

Despite these shocking statistics, few question AI’s role in the regression of human liberty. Instead, we blindly assume that the men who create AI, some of whom purchase breast milk on the black market, actively suggest revoking women’s voting rights, or attempt to mass-inseminate women with their sperm, will - for some unsaid reason - embed progressive gender values into their creations.

Unsurprisingly, this hasn’t happened. Today’s AI facilitates the spread of anti-feminist rhetoric, aggressively promoting misogynists like Andrew Tate through social media. Today’s AI generates and distributes violent porn for free and at scale. And worse still, today’s AI extends the classical physical violence against women’s bodies, now offering women's voices, images, likeness and identities up for use and exploitation by men.

To escape this trajectory, let’s confront the uncomfortable question:

Why do so many tech bros hate women?

Patriarchal Promises

The primary human fantasy, regardless of gender, is to be loved unconditionally.

Under patriarchy, men learn that they can only experience love by asserting superiority and control over women. According to this story, only once women are transformed into passive vessels, submit, adore, and silently support male ambition, never questioning men's inherent value, or genuine attractiveness, can men fully attain humanity’s best experience.

Regardless of societal progress, we’re still living in a patriarchal society. We're still constantly bombarded with this narrative. From the blood-soaked arena of Gladiator to a tech titan like Jess Besoz becoming a bodybuilder, from the Western image of a male competitive God, to the Western image of a male terminator-style AI, modern depictions of male value and loveability are driven by conquest and dominance. Whether it's physical battles, intellectual one-upmanship, or the relentless pursuit of status, the message is clear: male worthiness is earned only through victory.

A key problem, however, is that this message creates a negative-sum game in which everyone is left angry - even the handful of ‘victors’. Afterall, the world’s richest man is seemingly obsessed with purchasing popularity, billionaires are descending into human trafficking, rap stars are engaging in predatory acts, and business moguls transforming into power-hungry politicians: yet none appear to have found what they’re searching for.

None appear to have achieved love.

When men are trapped in endless competition to prove their worth - physically, intellectually, biologically, or morally - they are, ironically, isolated from the genuine connection they seek. No victory is ever enough, because what men are competing for cannot be won. Instead of providing a path to being loved, patriarchy promotes an unending pursuit of dominance, over humans, the environment, and the divine, precisely because the promised reward remains perpetually out of reach.

Female Rebellion

Men are taught that manliness comes through competition; when women excel it becomes emasculating and triggers aggressive reactions.

Throughout history, women like Amelia Earhart, Sister Cabrini, Marie Curie, and Rosalind Franklin have trolled the patriarchal narrative. Yet, instead of questioning the narrative’s validity, society has worked overdrive to minimize women’s contributions. We remain astonished by female exceptionalism, not because it is unprecedented, but because history has been rewritten to obscure it. This erasure is so pervasive it has a name: the Matilda Effect, where women’s groundbreaking achievements are downplayed or, more often, credited to men.

Consider Rosalind Franklin, whose pivotal research unraveled the structure of DNA, only for the Nobel Prize was awarded to Watson and Crick. Similarly, Lise Meitner, a co-discoverer of nuclear fission, was intentionally sidelined while Otto Hahn received the Nobel Prize alone. These examples are not anomalies but merely part of a recurring pattern.

From the 1st century to the 21st, across domains from religion to AI, women have been trailblazers. Chris Maunder’s Mary, Co-founder of Christianity reveals how Mary’s transformative role was rewritten to sustain the narrative of female submission. Similarly, James Essinger’s Ada’s Algorithm describes how Ada Lovelace’s pioneering work on the first computer algorithm was reframed to diminish her pivotal role in the invention of AI.

Women’s extraordinary contributions have shaped our world, from creating GPS, gas heaters, dishwashers, advanced space exploration, to mothering AI itself. We’re not allowed to acknowledge this because it’s too emotionally triggering - too threatening to the male hope for love. Instead, we’ve created a society where men start out angry because a patriarchal system forces them away from love, and then become even angrier when they see women succeed in ways they thought were reserved for men. 

Amplifying Anger

Patriarchy hurts men, greatly. Consider again the Matilda Effect: it may seem to benefit men by amplifying their achievements, but it does the opposite. By erasing women’s contributions, it inflates male success to unattainable heights, burdening future generations of men with impossible ideals. Young boys grow up internalizing a false narrative that men alone shaped history, creating a hollow myth of male supremacy that was never true to begin with.

Many young men interpret this realization as a defeat, internalizing feelings of inadequacy or redirecting their anger toward women. In our pursuit of gender progress, we haven’t dismantled the patriarchal idea that a man’s worth depends on a woman’s submission - we’ve merely stripped away men’s sense of worth altogether. Today, men have no real vision of what makes them worthy of love. Without this, men are unable to let go of competing, and start collaborating.

This has profound consequences.

Despite criticism of misogynistic figures, we fail to acknowledge what pain they address within our young. A reason why so many young men are drawn to online influencers like Andrew Tate, who, in the UK, is viewed positively by 23% of teenagers aged 13-15 is that he channels their disappointment into anger. And this is mobilizing. He then amplifies this anger, offering youngsters a sense of power and validation through aggression rather than addressing the deeper insecurities driving their feelings.

We’ve seen this before: the innovations of each era are used to co-opt male insecurities and perpetuate control over women. During the Industrial Revolution women’s labor was indispensable, challenging the male perception of self-worth. Tools like the printing press were then intentionally used by men to degrade women, spreading both the Bible and pornography to cement female subjugation.

Under patriarchy, innovation and technology provide women with both more rights and more abuse.

AI is Punishing Women

We see the same thing happening today.  AI is currently a weapon, not for collaboration, but for domination.

It shouldn’t be surprising that women’s names like Siri, Alexa, and Cortana are assigned to subservient AI, while male names like HAL, Jarvis, and Gort are given to dominant, ‘existential’ technologies: these technologies were created by men trained by society to seek dominance through competition.  Inevitably, this programming reinforces beliefs that women are obedient and men are leaders.

Beyond reinforcing traditional gender roles, AI exacerbates this imbalance by appropriating women's voices, images, and characteristics, and turning love and intimacy into commodities that can be controlled, manipulated, and monetized. Prominent early use cases of AI have created AI girlfriends, or more accurately, female digital servants. Between 2022 and 2023, Google searches for “AI girlfriend” surged 2,400%, with over 225 million downloads of AI companion apps globally. 

One of the most profitable uses of digital servants is pornography. AI now allows men to exploit women they know of, turning them into virtual slaves and repurposing their likeness without consent. Even Hollywood celebrities aren't exempt - despite Scarlett Johansson's explicit refusal, OpenAI attempted to use her voice anyway, a theft which they knew would be immediately recognized. This sets an astonishingly dangerous precedent for women's digital rights. It breaches not just copyrights, but human rights, with AI’s main model of profitability appearing to be that of goading sad men to abuse women. 

Having created these tools, the tech industry leverages social media platforms to drive monetization.  By intentionally amplifying voices that normalize women’s harassment and control, such as Andrew Tate or Ben Shapiro, and directing these influencers on young people worldwide, demand for female subjugation is increased. At the same time bots and echo chambers amplify relentless online abuse, demand for revenge porn, and cases of digital sexual assault, all to target women at scale to intimidate and silence them. 

Women face relentless online abuse, not as a byproduct of technology but as a deliberate weapon to demean and control them. Far from being cultural evolution, AI represents an intentional weakening of women’s power. The creators of AI hope the technology will finally compel women to submit, but the truth is these creators are only becoming more angry as women turn away from them.

As things stand, AI’s progress is decreasing in women’s rights. Given the prospect of AI consuming so much of the world’s resources, an outcome in which the creators still don’t receive the love they crave will surely drive their anger to unprecedented heights, resulting in yet more assault on women’s rights. 

This process is visibly underway in the US.

Changing Course

It doesn’t have to be this way. 

We can change course if we act now. 

All it will take is for AI to be created by people who don’t hate women, and who don’t hate themselves. 

This isn’t about diversity, equity, and inclusion metrics, nor something that can be solved through hiring campaigns or PR efforts branded as progressive. It’s not about enforcing homogeneity either. It’s about accepting that humans can be different, and innately worthy of love. This is a paradigm shift - a fundamental rejection of patriarchy’s relentless push to pit humans against one another in competition. Instead, it’s an unprecedented embrace of innate worth and a bold move toward genuine collaboration.

Men, women, non-binary - we’re all suffering when we need not. 

The prospect of liberation is not technical, it’s ideological. It’s the story we choose to tell ourselves about each other, and what makes us worthy. Our progress hangs on whether we have the grace needed to hold the emotional fall-out from exposing the truth of gender vulnerability and strengths. Whether we are brave enough to chart a new path in Western history; whether we have actually evolved enough to hold space for all human exceptionalism.