Blog by Rina Dupriet, SI Representative at UNESCO, Paris
Conference on Artificial Intelligence
National Council of French Women
April 2026 in the Senate in Paris
Artificial Intelligence opens a new stage of profound transformation of our societies.
This technological revolution raises a fundamental question:
Does it reinforce inequalities between women and men, or not?
The following questions should be asked:
Artificial Intelligence: who builds it, who takes advantage of it, and where is the place of women?
The origin of AI is based on three American men: Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann and Alan Turing.
They wanted to duplicate the human brain. For them, memory is the centre of intelligence, with a link to power.
Alan Turing proposes a game to see if the computer can be intelligent and think. He wants to know if it can replace a man and a woman.
The American John McCarthy defines a type of neuro-symbolic AI that combines both neural and symbolic architectures in order to address the weaknesses of each, and thus provide an AI capable of reasoning, learning and cognitive modelling.
Paths then open with symbolic AI and statistical AI, used to group data, for example with Google, ChatGPT, video streaming, etc.
There is also hybrid AI, and large-scale generative AI capable of creating text, images, video and audio.
It is based on giant language models, known as LLMs.
Solène Malledant, known as “MAL”, changed her name in order to be recruited more easily as a woman, and analyses the functioning of digital systems, especially in terms of invoicing in companies. She is one of the new talents ready to support companies.
At the level of education, AI is a decisive step, with calculators, spellcheckers, ChatGPT, etc.
In terms of employment, chatbots have been shown to reproduce bias, for example by discouraging women from entering computer science. Women currently represent only 18% in this sector.
In the 1960s and 1970s, women had just entered the world of work in large numbers.
In 1980, the arrival of Apple in companies created a real technological shift.
Today, the question arises as to whether there has been a real link between these two developments, and how they can lead to a collective reflection so that AI becomes a real lever for social justice—economically, socially and ethically—and allows women to find their rightful place.
