Nicky Leijtens - AI Is Not Neutral: The Gender Gap Nobody Talks About

AI is not neutral. The gender gap in AI runs through the data it is trained on, the people who build it and the people who use it. And in legal, almost nobody talks about it. Nicky Leijtens, co-founder of She Breaks the Law and part of Bird & Bird, joins Hidde Bruinsma with examples that stick. Ask ChatGPT for career advice as a girl and the answer is less encouraging than the one a boy gets. Women make up 22% of AI development teams, a number that has not moved in ten years of Stanford research. At the M&A Awards, 42 nominations included exactly one woman. Why does the gender gap in AI stay off the agenda while every conference talks adoption and implementation? And what can you do tomorrow, whether you build, buy or simply use legal AI? Powered by Zeno This episode is powered by Zeno. Zeno is an AI native legal workspace built for Dutch and EU law. Its AI navigates law like a human legal professional. Secure, transparent and grounded in authoritative sources. Visit zeno.law and make deep thinking your competitive edge. You'll learn why AI reflects the people who build it, and who is missing from that room what happens when biased models start influencing legal decisions and access to justice how visibility creates permission for other women to experiment why women adopt AI less and are judged more harshly when they do use it what closes the gender gap in AI according to Nicky: small actions that add up Chapters 00:00 Introduction 00:05 She Breaks the Law: 4,000 women in 50 countries 07:43 Rechtwijzer and better justice journeys 13:51 The gender gap in AI nobody talks about 14:39 AI is not neutral: data, users, builders 16:39 Airbags, heart attacks and the male default 18:08 Only 22% of AI builders are women 20:25 Closing the gender gap in AI: where to start 25:30 The Rik de Groot moment at Legal Geek 29:14 Zeno question: auditing legal AI tools for bias 34:27 42 nominations, one woman at the M&A Awards 42:54 Antibodies: who is blocking the change 50:39 What you can do tomorrow about the gender gap in AI