Empowering Women through Blockchain: Reshaping Gender Dynamics in the AI Era

CN
14 hours ago

Author: Lisa Loud, Executive Director of Secret Network

If left unchecked, algorithms will replicate past biases at machine speed, marginalizing half the workforce and perpetuating wage gaps for an entire generation.

The latest warning from the International Labour Organization indicates that nearly 10% of jobs held by women in high-income economies are facing significant changes due to generative artificial intelligence—this rate is nearly three times that of men.

The solution lies in blockchain technology, born for transparency and co-governance. Distributed ledgers can reveal biases from the source of data and enshrine economic rights in code, preventing algorithms from quietly erasing women's rights.

Generative systems not only misrepresent women's images but also reshape a world devoid of female authority. When asked to depict leaders, image models still default to male faces; when it comes to caregivers, they default to female. This pattern, as pointed out by UN Women, is a "discriminatory feedback loop" that has long permeated various stages such as recruitment, lending, and medical triage.

The economic impact follows.

Female-dominated administrative and clerical positions are at the forefront of the AI impact. The threat to nearly 10% of female jobs means millions of positions are at risk of downgrading, differentiation, or even disappearance.

Talent cultivation and career development channels are similarly affected, and this concerning data is highly relevant. Globally, women with AI engineering skills account for only 29.4%, reflecting the continuation of bias on two levels: first, women are overlooked in training data, and second, they are excluded from problem-solving in the workplace.

Even so, the industry continues to promote the myth of "code neutrality." This narrative misleads every woman globally—algorithms disguise biases under a mathematical facade. Meanwhile, engineers at large tech companies receive a so-called moral exemption for "statistical inevitability," while women struggle to voice their rights.

Whenever resume screening models lower women's scores due to childcare gaps, machines are not genuinely enhancing efficiency; they are executing ideological tasks. Each biased output reinforces data barriers, allowing future systems to continue absorbing these biases, turning yesterday's injustices into tomorrow's "facts."

Opacity fuels discrimination, while blockchain eliminates opacity.

On-chain credential wallets empower women with the unforgeable autonomy over academic records, work histories, and caregiving certifications, which are often overlooked by traditional resume parsing tools. In contrast, smart contract compensation systems can automatically enforce equal pay principles, generating public equality proofs that no private algorithm can tamper with.

More transformative is blockchain's ability to trace data sources, where every text, image, or biometric record can carry gender-segmented metadata and encrypted signatures.

Imagine if training corpora underestimate women (or only portray women through stereotypes), auditors could trace every model output back to specific flaws and require developers to retrain, or else they cannot participate in procurement.

This is not just about fairness. Analysts tracking the adoption of Web3 point out that women's absence in decentralized finance (DeFi) and governance is undermining public trust and threatening widespread adoption.

Therefore, ensuring equality from the outset is not only a moral responsibility but also crucial to the vision of blockchain itself and the success or failure of achieving true equality globally.

Mandatory transparency is the policy gap. Legislative bodies should require that any AI models used for recruitment, credit assessment, or public services must disclose their training data sources on a permissionless ledger.

No traceability, no deployment.

Government procurement should only award contracts to systems that have passed gender balance audits on-chain to accelerate change. Tax policies should incentivize projects that tokenize women's creative, caregiving, or research contributions, returning royalties to women who have long provided unpaid labor to the economy.

Critics argue that blockchain adds complexity, but complexity has long existed, hidden within proprietary datasets and black-box models. Transparent ledgers are entirely different.

Shifting complexity to an open environment allows civil society experts to examine and trace any flaws or areas for improvement, benefiting everyone. Once biases are exposed, pressure and litigation follow, and those silent injustices can be transformed into actionable evidence.

The inertia of history is exclusion; technology must not repeat the past. Blockchain builds an architecture where every data point and wage package is traceable, verifiable, and cannot be altered unnoticed.

Adopting this architecture now means the next generation of algorithms will no longer view women as statistical "outliers," but as contributors shaping the future together.

Artificial intelligence is design, not destiny. Let design go on-chain, and erasure will not occur.

Author: Lisa Loud, Executive Director of Secret Network.

Related: Coinbase crypto lobbying group urges Congress to support key crypto legislation

Original: “Blockchain Empowers Women: Reshaping Gender Dynamics in the AI Era”

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