A Just AI Transition for Women

Five Gaps, Five Answers, Your Reality Check

Most AI policy aimed at women is about training. Learn the tools, take the course, adapt. That answers one question and skips a harder one: who owns the firms, who wins the contracts, who decides how the technology gets deployed, and who absorbs the cost of the change.

Task Force 3 of Thematic Working Group 6 (Women Shaping the AI Economy), part of the European Union funded Connecting Women in Digital Forum, has spent this year on that harder question. Our preliminary findings set out five gaps in the way European AI and transition policy is currently built, and five answers designed to be inserted into instruments already moving through Brussels rather than proposed as a separate equality agenda sitting next to them.

Before this goes to the Connecting Women in Digital Summit in Dublin, we want it tested by the women it is supposed to serve.

What we will put to you:

• What "good jobs" should mean when AI arrives in the sectors where women actually work
• Why just transition funding organised around regions misses AI, which cuts across occupations and tasks instead
• How public procurement quietly decides which firms get to supply AI, and why so few of those firms are women-led
• Where the money stops for women founders, and what the Commission's own strategy already admits about it
• What we should be measuring, and what today's metrics keep out of sight

This is an interactive session, not a presentation. If you run a business, hire, sell to public buyers, or work inside an organisation deploying AI, your experience is evidence. Come and tell us what we have missed.

About our speakers,

Catherine Mulligan, Ph.D. FHEA

Catherine leads Task Force 3. She is the founder of Digital Crossroads, a virtual lab bringing researchers, technologists and policymakers together around the data economy, and a visiting academic in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London, where she previously co-directed the Centre for Cryptocurrency Research and Engineering. She is the author of multiple books.

Caroline De Cock, LL.M.

Caroline is a technology and AI policy strategist working at the intersection of AI governance, digital rights and public discourse. She is Head of Research at information labs, a Senior Fellow at the Lisbon Council, and the founder of N-square Consulting and Square-up Agency. She is the author of AI Tools, Not Gods: Why Artificial Intelligence Hype Threatens Global Governance and How to Fix It (2026).

Alexander Galt

Alexander is Digital Ethics Leader at IKEA and sits on the board of MyData Global. He was previously a digital ethicist at Deloitte and a data scientist at the United Kingdom Government Digital Service, and his published work includes policy recommendations on ethical and responsible AI.