The TechDiversity Foundation has launched the Govern the Future Scholarship Programme, opening sponsorship places to 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.

TechDiversity Foundation Executive Director Luli Adeyemo said, “AI does not invent the problems we see in deployed systems. 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.”

Gap Report

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.

Ms Adeyemo said 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,” Ms 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.”