The $20 Trillion Question: Why Excluding Women from AI Development Costs the Global Economy

When half the world’s population is systematically excluded from designing, building, and using artificial intelligence, we don’t just face a fairness problem—we face an economic crisis. Our new analysis for the UN Commission on Science and Technology for Development reveals how gender exclusion in AI threatens to constrain the technology’s transformative potential and what policymakers must do about it.

This isn’t another paper about AI ethics or women in tech. This is about economic survival in an AI-powered future. While projections promise nearly $20 trillion in global economic gains from AI by 2030, those gains remain fundamentally constrained by a stark reality: women represent only 31% of workers at major AI companies, comprise just one-third of global researchers, and face systematic exclusion from the datasets, decision-making processes, and design teams shaping AI systems worldwide.

The evidence demonstrates that this exclusion creates measurable economic losses. Teams with gender parity produce 40% more patents. Gender-responsive technology assessment leads to innovations that reduce resource usage by 28% while increasing productivity by 33%. Mobile systems incorporating women’s perspectives see 42% higher adoption rates. Yet current AI development systematically misses these opportunities, creating systems with accuracy rates as low as 20% for complex tasks—performance failures that correlate directly with exclusionary practices.

For developing economies, the stakes are even higher. AI offers unprecedented leapfrog opportunities, but only if nations can mobilize their full talent pools and customize AI capabilities to local contexts. The IMF quantifies potential GDP gains of up to 35% through closing digital gender gaps—transformation that remains locked away while women are absent from AI ideation, invisible in training datasets, and falling behind in adoption of generative AI tools.