AI skills still deemed ‘masculine’: Will artificial intelligence shatter tech’s gendered glass ceiling, or reinforce it further?
Women can fly airplanes. They can rule nations. They can build technologies that change the world. But AI skills? Men say those are masculine, according to a recent Capgemini report. We are living in 2025. Really?The world applauds progress with one hand and writes bias into its code with the other. Women have always been sidelined in the tech world, sometimes by exclusion, sometimes by perception. And as artificial intelligence becomes the new measure of leadership, the same story continues, just in a more sophisticated disguise. The patriarchy, it seems, has gone digital.
The paradox of progress: Confidence without conviction
A new report by the Capgemini Research Institute, “Gender and Leadership: Navigating Bias, Opportunity and Change”, lays bare this contradiction. Across 11 countries, in a survey of 2,750 leaders, progress appears real on paper: 77% of men and women now agree that women are just as effective as men in leadership roles. Confidence, that elusive currency of power, stands almost equal: 58% of women and 59% of men. Even belief in women’s leadership impact is soaring, with 68% of respondents saying that more women in top positions improve business performance.And yet, beneath this reassuring data hums an older narrative, quieter but persistent. Nearly half of male respondents still describe the defining skills of the future, artificial intelligence, automation, innovation, and data analytics, as “inherently masculine.”The numbers expose a truth that polite boardroom language often disguises: Equality in belief is not equality in perception. The bias is not gone; it has simply evolved, camouflaged in the language of technology.Most women, conversely, view these skills as gender-neutral, with over a third even describing innovation as “inherently feminine.”
The masculinization of the machine
There is something telling about the fact that AI, a field built on logic, precision, and power, is still imagined in masculine form. It’s the same reflex that makes us picture CEOs in dark suits and coders as lone men in hoodies. The association of intelligence with masculinity has not vanished; it has merely moved online.Capgemini’s study reveals that most women see AI and innovation skills as gender-neutral, some even describe innovation as “inherently feminine.” Yet, the perception held by male leaders continues to shape opportunity. When technological competence is subconsciously gendered, it creates an invisible barrier, a leadership filter that privileges perception over proficiency.This is not the bias of algorithms; it is the bias that teaches algorithms what to value. When decision-makers view the future of leadership through a masculine lens, they risk encoding old hierarchies into the systems of tomorrow.
The silent reprogramming of leadership
The modern workplace likes to imagine it has moved beyond bias. It has slogans, diversity statements, and “equity strategies.” But perception bias, especially in technology-led industries, is subtler and more insidious.When AI and data analytics are deemed masculine, women in leadership are subtly pushed into the periphery, expected to manage people, not machines; to nurture, not innovate. They are applauded for empathy but doubted in expertise. The effect is cumulative and corrosive.Leadership is being rewritten by technology, but not for everyone equally. If digital fluency becomes a litmus test for leadership, and that fluency is viewed through gendered assumptions, then women may find themselves locked out of the very future they helped imagine. The Capgemini report warns that this perception bias could “reinforce the leadership divide” precisely when technology is redefining what it means to lead.
The digital ceiling: A new glass, harder to see
The glass ceiling has not shattered; it has simply gone transparent. The modern version doesn’t manifest as overt exclusion but as a quiet erosion of credibility, a perception that women are less aligned with the technological future.Even as women master data science, lead innovation labs, and steer AI policy, they remain exceptions in a narrative still written by men. Patriarchy has flourished and been celebrated in glee, previously in societies and now in the digital economy.
Rewriting the leadership algorithm
If technology is the new language of power, then redefining who gets to speak it is a moral imperative. Organisations cannot automate their way to equality. They must dismantle the cultural scaffolding that equates intellect with aggression and innovation with masculinity.True digital leadership does not only find its roots in code proficiency; it also questions the assumptions veiling it. That requires a diversity of minds, especially the ones historically left out of the conversations.The Capgemini report is not just a study in statistics. It’s a mirror held up to our modern delusions: Progress is not yet linear, and we have not freed ourselves from ingrained prejudices.
The final question: Who codes the future?
The future will be programmed and evolve, this is certain. But by whom and for whom? If the architects of tomorrow still believe that power, logic, and innovation belong to one gender, then AI will not liberate us, it will simply automate our old hierarchies. Women are not victims of AI. They are victims of the narrations we tell about who belongs beside it. Until we decide to rewrite the story in the boardrooms, classrooms, and, of course, in code we will remain trapped in a the world of stereotypes.Because intelligence, no matter whether artificial or human, will always be biased until the people moulding it are not.
