Reclaiming Feminism In The Age Of AI

By Raji Mohanam

In the age of artificial intelligence, the cost of misunderstanding feminism has never been higher. Technology is shaping what is seen, heard, and remembered. If women are not centered in this creation, the same hierarchies that have always defined power will simply be rewritten in code.

At some point during the past decade, feminism became flattened into a lifestyle brand. Neatly packaged into slogans and wellness retreats. It became a curated feed of "empowerment" and pastel affirmations masquerading as liberation. We must return to what feminism truly means, because only that clarity can guide us toward building technology that serves justice rather than replicates oppression.

Feminism is about collective liberation, not merely having a 'choice'.

Today, "choice" has been mistaken for "freedom." A woman's right to marry or not, work or not, have kids or not is celebrated as feminism simply because it's her choice. But this logic collapses under scrutiny. If a woman "chooses" to accept unequal pay because she needs the job, is that feminism? If she "chooses" traditions that limit her mobility because rejecting them means social exile, is that liberation? Choice framed this way ignores the structures shaping what options even appear on the menu. It mistakes navigating oppression for dismantling it.

Choice without context is hollow. Choice without consciousness is a market transaction, not liberation. Real freedom isn't about selecting from pre-approved options within an unjust system. Freedom results from transforming the system itself so that all women have genuine autonomy, safety, and power. Collective liberation means asking: What conditions must exist for every woman's choices to be truly free? What structures must fall for those conditions to emerge?

Feminism was born as revolt against structures that valued women only for service, silence, and self-denial. It was never about helping individual women succeed within patriarchy. It was about tearing down those patriarchal systems altogether. Yet somewhere, the project was reframed. Feminism became about "leaning in," about working twice as hard to earn half the respect, about optimizing yourself to fit into systems designed to exclude you.

Across cultures, one message persists: that a woman's virtue lies in her restraint, her endurance, her ability to make herself small so others may thrive. She must be the glue holding families together, the invisible labor behind every success, the one who sacrifices sleep, ambition, and selfhood. The modern world dresses this up as "balance" or "having it all". As if grinding yourself down to nothing in service of everyone else's dreams is somehow empowerment. But the message remains unchanged: women exist to serve.

This is the script we risk encoding into AI. When algorithms learn from our past, they learn our biases. When they optimize for our present, they optimize for inequality. If we don't challenge these old myths now, they will become permanent features of the intelligent systems governing our future.

Now these messages risk becoming embedded in the technologies shaping our future. Algorithms are not neutral; they inherit our histories. If we fail to challenge the old myths of gender and power, they will live on in the machines governing our choices, our data, our narratives.

The feminism that matters in the age of AI must return to its original promise: collective liberation. It must teach us not only how to resist patriarchal systems, but how to design entirely new ones.

To "center women" in AI is not to add token names to conference speaker lists or hire women to fix systems built without them. It is to reimagine intelligence itself. To create intelligence that is about interdependence not dominance. It is to design futures that reflect empathy, plurality, and care.

Collective liberation means freedom from centuries-old scripts about who leads, who serves, and whose labor remains invisible. It asks not what women can do, but what women shouldn't have to do anymore. Real feminism is about the courage to question, not to conform. It's not about being palatable; it's about being awake and aware.

The paradigm shift begins when women stop apologizing for their power, when freedom is no longer a privilege to be earned, and when liberation becomes a shared awakening rather than an individual performance. Our liberation is bound together. Until all women, across all cultures and all algorithms, are free to exist without sacrifice, none of us are free.