As the global race to build artificial intelligence (AI) systems accelerates, much of the spotlight has been on breakthroughs, investments, and geopolitical competition. But beneath that noise, a shift
is reshaping the technology workforce, with more women stepping into leadership roles that influence how AI systems are designed, built, and deployed at scale.
In India, large technology companies are increasingly building global AI platforms, with engineering teams contributing to products used by millions worldwide.
At the same time, women’s participation in India’s tech workforce is inching up. According to the latest report by Foundit, women now make up around 32% of the technology workforce, up from 29% a year ago. Hiring for emerging technologies has also seen a rise, with women’s participation touching 31% in 2026.
Yet, the gap remains stark in artificial intelligence roles, where women account for only about 20% of the workforce. It is within this uneven landscape that a new cohort of women leaders is beginning to shape the future of AI.
How Has Women Representation In Leadership Roles Evolved?
Women’s representation in Indian leadership has evolved from minimal participation to a steady increase, driven by 33%-50% local government reservations and corporate diversity initiatives, according to a KPMG report.
Women’s representation in technology leadership is improving, but progress remains gradual and uneven. Women hold only 14% to 19% of senior roles in AI-related fields, despite accounting for over 30% of the entry-level workforce. Even though India has one of the world’s largest pools of female STEM graduates, around 43%, a persistent “broken pipeline” continues to hinder their progression, contributing to a 64% gender gap in AI leadership, according to the Women in Technology report, Rethinking Opportunity, Equity & the Future of Work: The Evolving Landscape for Women in Technology in the Age of AI 2026, by ANSR in collaboration with Talent500.
“There has been encouraging progress over the years, particularly as more women build deep expertise across engineering, cloud, and AI-driven technologies. At the same time, strengthening representation in leadership roles requires a sustained focus on building strong talent pipelines and creating opportunities for women to lead complex technical initiatives. At Amazon, engineers are often given the opportunity to work on systems that operate at massive scale, from the platforms that power customer experiences to the machine learning capabilities that developers build on through AWS. Experiences like these help engineers develop both technical depth and leadership capability over time,” said Swetha Shankar, Director, Software Development, Amazon, Bengaluru.
What is driving meaningful change is not just hiring, but sustained investment in career growth. Companies are increasingly focusing on leadership pipelines, skill-building, and inclusive policies. The shift is also being supported by visibility; more women leaders today are shaping product decisions and mentoring the next generation.
Nearly 33.5% of women learners in India enrolled in Generative AI (GenAI) courses online over the past year, according to the latest Coursera report. Titled One Year Later: The Gender Gap in GenAI, the study shows that women’s participation in GenAI courses rose by 2.2 percentage points between 2024 and 2025. It also found that women outperformed men in course completion rates by a margin of three percentage points.
How Are Women Engineers Contributing To The Designs Of Global Platforms?
Women engineers in India are no longer working on isolated systems; they are contributing to platforms that operate across continents. From AI-powered recommendations to cloud infrastructure, teams based in Bengaluru are building solutions that must adapt to diverse markets, languages, and user behaviours.
“Women engineers work on platforms that operate at a global scale, ensuring our solutions are robust, inclusive, and effective across varied market contexts. They are at the forefront of exploring and implementing cutting-edge AI technologies, launching features that serve not just regional markets like India, but customers globally. Through our internal hackathons and innovation programs, women engineers consistently emerge as winners and leaders, driving features that span multiple international markets. In one of my teams, women’s perspectives on Fashion innovation have been instrumental in creating customer value and competitive advantage. Their insights help us better understand and serve diverse customer needs across different markets. All in all, building global platforms requires strong collaboration and diverse perspectives, and engineers across teams contribute to ensuring these systems work seamlessly for customers everywhere,” explained Shankar.
This global exposure is reshaping engineering roles. Women engineers are involved in designing systems that are scalable, inclusive, and sensitive to regional contexts—whether it is optimising algorithms for different markets or ensuring products work seamlessly across geographies.
Women engineers are driving the design of B2B SaaS enterprise experiences and AI-enabled automation, ensuring user-friendly and equitable solutions.
How Mentorship, Representation, And Workplace Culture Help Women?
Mentorship and representation play a critical role in accelerating careers. In large organisations, having access to senior leaders, especially women in leadership, can significantly influence career trajectories.
“These are foundational elements that drive women’s career progression in large companies, and they have improved significantly over the last few years. Amazon is a place where we consciously recognize the importance of these elements and have made systematic changes at the grassroots level. When organisations focus on creating strong mentorship networks and encourage engineers to take ownership of complex projects, it helps individuals build both confidence and technical leadership. It has been imperative for us to grow women in senior roles and especially in technical leadership,” pointed out Shankar.
She further said engineers often work on challenging problems, from scaling distributed systems to integrating machine learning capabilities into customer experiences. This allows engineers to continuously learn and grow while contributing to technology that serves millions of users. Mentorship and leadership programmes for management and technical leaders play a pivotal role in shaping a person’s career.
Workplace culture is equally important. Environments that encourage collaboration, flexible work, and continuous learning tend to retain more women. Representation at the top also creates a ripple effect, making leadership roles seem more accessible and achievable.
“When I was faced with a complex choice, one of my mentors mentioned: ‘The only bad choice is the one that is not made. This powerful statement has helped me shape into an assertive global leader,” she stressed.
What’s Driving Growth In AI And Machine Learning?
The rise of AI and machine learning is creating new demand for specialised skills, and women are gradually entering these fields. Increased access to online learning, industry certifications, and structured training programmes is helping bridge the entry barrier.
At the same time, companies are actively investing in reskilling initiatives to move engineers into AI roles.
AI-related job postings in South Asia have more than doubled, rising from 2.9% to 6.5% between 2023 and 2025, according to a press note by Press Information Bureau. The demand for AI skills is also growing rapidly, increasing 75% faster than roles outside the AI domain.
At the same time, women’s participation in the sector is steadily improving. Women now account for roughly one-third of technology roles in India and make up about 20% of enrolments in AI and machine learning programmes, up sharply from just 5% in 2024, according to India Brand Equity Foundation.
The 2025 Women in Technology report highlights that India’s GCCs have stronger gender representation, with women holding 16-17% of the nearly 6,500 total leadership roles. However, there remains a significant gap, with around a 40% drop in representation from entry-level to senior leadership.
“In the past, people have specialized in areas like AI and machine learning later in their careers, and we know that as we go up the ladder, the representation of women in more senior roles is still lower. However, just like all of us in the industry have joined hands to improve women’s representation at all levels, we are also now focused on building stronger pathways that encourage more engineers, including women, to explore these specializations early in their careers. This includes enabling access to learning resources, hands-on projects, and mentorship. These measures are already helping with engineers at all levels now experimenting and building with AI, way earlier than they have ever done with any new technology in the past,” said Gitanjali Bhutani, Director, Software Development, Amazon.
How Can Experienced Women Professionals Increase Their Viability In AI Careers?
For experienced professionals, the transition into AI often requires a combination of technical upskilling and practical exposure. Building a strong foundation in data science, machine learning frameworks, and problem-solving is essential.
“AI is one of the fastest evolving areas in technology, and professionals looking to build careers in this space benefit from continuously strengthening both their technical foundations and their ability to apply AI to real-world problems. To gain expertise in AI, it is important to get hands-on experience and ensure you are solving problems hands-on with AI, rather than just trying to learn from the experience of people around you. Secondly, now more than ever, there is a need for people who understand systems holistically and can visualize and build extensible systems, as AI evolves. So, work hard on strengthening your system design knowledge, as well as machine learning fundamentals, to understand how these systems work and how they can be optimized for your use case. Finally, stay curious and open to learning,” Bhutani explains.
What Young Girls And Women Should Know About Building Careers In Technology?
For young women entering technology, the most important takeaway is that the field is far broader than traditional coding roles. Careers today span product design, data science, AI research, and platform engineering.
Early exposure to STEM in India is crucial for bridging the gender gap in AI/ML, as hands-on, early engagement with coding and robotics helps dismantle stereotypes and sparks interest. Mentorship and visible female role models are vital, as they boost confidence, counteract societal biases, and provide pathways for girls to pursue technical careers, according to a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report, 2024.
“Technology today offers an opportunity to build solutions that can impact millions of people across the world. For young girls considering careers in this field, curiosity, problem-solving, and a willingness to learn continuously are often the most important starting points. There are also many initiatives designed to help young women explore opportunities in technology… With the right support systems and opportunities to learn, young women today can play a powerful role in shaping the future of innovation,” said Bhutani.
What’s Driving Big Tech Companies To Invest In Women Engineers?
For global technology companies, diversity is no longer just a social goal; it is a business imperative. Diverse teams are known to build better, more inclusive products, especially in AI, where bias and fairness are critical concerns.
“Solving complex problems requires diverse perspectives and experiences… When you build products and platforms used by millions of people across different markets, diverse teams help ensure the technology reflects a broader set of ideas and user needs. Women engineers today are contributing across some of the most advanced areas of technology—from large-scale distributed systems to AI-powered customer experiences. AI capabilities are increasingly powering features such as personalized recommendations and conversational shopping tools, which help customers discover products and make informed choices. Building these kinds of intelligent systems requires diverse thinking. That’s why companies continue to invest in strong and inclusive engineering talent pipelines,” said Payal Gupta, Director, Software Development, Amazon, Bengaluru.
Investing in women engineers also helps companies address talent shortages in high-demand areas such as AI and cloud computing. As competition for skilled professionals intensifies, expanding the talent pool becomes essential.
How Can Women Leaders Help Shape Systems And Bring Change?
Women leaders are increasingly influencing how technology is designed and consumed by bringing diverse perspectives into decision-making. This often translates into more user-centric products that consider a wider range of needs.
In AI, where ethical considerations are becoming central, this diversity can help identify blind spots and reduce biases in systems. While leadership styles vary across individuals, inclusive and collaborative approaches are often highlighted as strengths that women leaders bring to the table.
“Technology today touches almost every aspect of how people live, shop, communicate, and access services. When leadership teams building these systems bring diverse experiences and perspectives, it helps ensure that the solutions are more thoughtful and inclusive. Women leaders contribute significantly by bringing different viewpoints to system design, product thinking, and team collaboration. This is particularly valuable when the goal is deep customer-centricity, understanding not just what customers say they want, but also anticipating needs across different contexts and use cases. In areas like AI and large-scale platforms, these perspectives help teams build solutions that are intuitive, reliable, and relevant for global audiences. Ultimately, strong technology leadership is about building diverse teams that can solve complex problems and deliver meaningful innovation,” explained Gupta.
How Organisations Can Bridge The Gap Between Women’s Participation And Representation
Bridging the gap requires a multi-layered approach. Hiring more women is only the first step; retaining and promoting them is equally important.
“Accelerating women’s participation and representation requires sustained investment across the entire talent pipeline… This means not just hiring talent, but actively building environments where women can thrive, take on complex challenges, and step into leadership roles. Programmes like Amazon WoW (Women of the World) help connect women engineering students with mentors, learning opportunities, and industry exposure early in their careers, helping them build strong foundations in technology. Equally important is creating environments where people can take ownership of challenging projects and develop both technical depth and leadership skills. Over time, these efforts help strengthen leadership pipelines and ensure more women can grow into senior technical and management roles,” stressed Gupta.
How Will The Rise Of Women Leaders Shape The Future Of AI?
As more women move into leadership roles, they are likely to play a defining role in shaping the future of AI. From setting ethical standards to influencing product design, their impact will extend beyond engineering to the broader direction of technology.
“AI is rapidly transforming industries. The future of AI will be shaped by leaders who can think holistically about how these systems work in practice, not just the technical architecture, but how they perform across different use cases, markets, and customer needs. It is not about men or women, it is about how we are all increasingly driving these conversations and building AI systems that are both powerful and practical. The systems being built today will influence how people interact with technology for years to come, and every leader should bring the perspectives needed to ensure these systems are designed and deployed thoughtfully,” said Gupta.
India’s role in the global AI ecosystem is expanding rapidly, and women are becoming an increasingly important part of that story. While the numbers still reflect a gap, the trajectory points towards gradual but meaningful change.
