Last year, at a women’s conference in London, I was disappointed to see that digital inclusion — and AI in particular — was missing from the agenda. I remember telling the NGO’s CEO about my concerns, even mentioning my articles on AI as a techno-patriarchal tool.

Her receptive response had given me hope. That hope was reignited this year when I eagerly reviewed the program and discovered a panel on AI.

The evening before the event, an unexpected sense of dread began to settle in. When I asked myself why, the answer struck me like a lightning bolt.

I dreaded hearing the “we need more women in tech” mantra once more – another example of how we deflect the solution of a systemic problem to those bearing the brunt of it.

Let me tell you what I mean.

Women as Human Fixers 

For millennia, women had been assigned the duty to give birth and care for children, rooted in the fact that most of them can carry human fetuses for 9 months. That duty to be a womb endures today, where ownership of our bodies is being taken away through coercive anti-abortion laws.

Our “duty” of care has been broadened to the workplace, where we’ve been assigned the unwritten rule of “fixing” all that’s dysfunctional.

• Coerced into doing things nobody else cares to do, i.e. weaponised incompetence.
• Fixing teams’ dynamics because we’re the “naturally” collaborative ones.
• Doing the glue work — being appointed the shoulder where all team members can cry and find an “empathetic ear”.
• Do the office work — we’re the ones that are “organised”, so dull tasks pile up on our desks whilst “less” organised peers do the promotable work.

And that “fixer” stereotype now includes “our” duties as women in tech. When the sector was in its infancy, women were doing the supposedly boring stuff (programming) while men were doing the hardware (the “cool” stuff). When computers took off, we trained men in programming so they could become our managers. Then, we were pushed out of those jobs in the 1980s. The only constant has been doing the job but not getting the accolades (see women’s role in Bletchley Park, Hidden Figures).

Moreover, whilst statistics tell us that 50% of women leave tech by age 35, young girls and women are supposed to brush off that “inconvenient” truth and rest assured that tech is an excellent place for a career. Moreover, that they are anointed to make tech work for everybody.

What’s not to like, right?

Then, let me show the to-do list of 21 tasks and expectations the world imposes on each woman in tech.