Here is what women want from AI.

This weekend, you published an article featuring Marissa Mayer with the headline ‘What Do Women Want From A.I.?’ Marissa is one of the most prominent women in tech. First female engineer at Google. Former CEO of Yahoo. Board member at Walmart, Starbucks, AT&T, and Hilton. She’s achieved things that most people, men or women, can only dream of. So when the New York Times features her to talk about what women want from AI, I’m listening.

And apparently, according to the article, what women want from AI is help picking outfits, planning birthday parties, and figuring out what makes our own children special. Oh, and make AI more visually appealing, because women like pretty things.

Are. You. Kidding. Me.

We’re in the middle of probably the biggest technological revolution of our lifetime. AI is removing the cost of building software, making expertise accessible to anyone, and creating entirely new paths to economic independence. We have technology that could completely change who gets to build, who gets to lead, who gets to create wealth, and who gets to shape the future. And somehow, one of the most accomplished women in Silicon Valley ends up in the New York Times talking about how AI can help women pick outfits?

No. Just NO.

Let me be clear about what I'm mad about. It's not that the NYT chose to cover Marissa or her new company, Dazzle. It's definitely not that the article discusses domestic uses of AI.

My issue is with how the story is framed. It starts with the headline: Asking about ‘what women want from AI’ is a BIG question. It deserves an answer much bigger than shopping, childcare, and household management. Because the way we talk about technology shapes who believes it’s for them.

When we talk about men and AI, we so often imagine what they might create. When we talk about women and AI, why do we keep coming back to what they might manage?

When girls repeatedly see AI presented as a tool for shopping, organizing, and managing households, what does that tell them about the role they’re expected to play in the future? When entrepreneurs see women framed primarily as consumers of lifestyle products, what kinds of products will they think are worth building for women? And when investors already have deeply ingrained assumptions about female founders and female markets, does this framing challenge those assumptions or reinforce them?

What women really want from AI.

I want AI to dismantle the barriers that have historically kept women from building businesses and achieving economic independence.

I want AI to help women with brilliant ideas build billion-dollar companies without needing an engineering degree, a VC network, or permission from anybody.

I want AI to help close the funding gap. (Female-founded companies raised just 1.1% of US VC money in 2025, per PitchBook: $3.2B total from all-female teams (from 794 deals) vs. $191.1B from all-male teams (from 10,048 deals).)

I want AI to help women build their own generational wealth.

I want AI to turn more women into founders, investors, and billionaires.

I want AI to empower the women to make discoveries in science, medicine, engineering, and energy. And while we’re at it, finally help solve women’s health problems that have been ignored for decades.

I want AI to make this world safer for women.

I want AI to eliminate the invisible household labor women disproportionately carry, not just make us more efficient at doing it.

I want AI to help women advance their careers.

I want AI to give women more negotiating power, influence, and access.

I want AI to expand what women believe is possible for themselves, rather than reinforce what society expects of them.

And I want women to stop asking for a seat at the table and start building the entire fucking table.

Now, I’m one woman with my own ambitions. I certainly don’t get to speak for the other 4 billion women on this planet. But after I shared my frustration with this article , hundreds of people joined the conversation, and what struck me was how much bigger their imaginations were than the ones reflected in the article.

‘The biggest opportunity AI creates for women isn’t just daily convenience. For me it’s independence,’ wrote Julia A.

Lisandra M. added, ‘AI isn’t just helping women do more. It’s creating opportunities for us to build more, own more, create wealth, and redefine what’s possible.’

Vidya S. wrote, ‘What women want is capital, visibility, the power and influence to build and integrate AI into the society that serves women AND men well for generations to come.’

And Petra M. put it even more directly: ‘WE WANT THE SAME THINGS AS MEN! Investment opportunities. The chance to lead innovation in the field. To be taken seriously when we talk about it.’

See?? Women aren’t just waiting for the AI revolution to happen to them. They’re participating in it, building with it, and trying to make sure they have a say in where it goes.

And yes, women also want AI to help with household responsibilities. I’m a mom of 2, and I would be so freakin happy if AI could manage the endless logistics of school, sports, appointments, and everything else that somehow ends up on my calendar. If AI could load and unload my dishwasher, I might personally fund the company.

But here’s a radical thought: Maybe the father could use AI to plan the damn birthday party too?

As Deb Haas pointed out in the comments, ‘Why are we treating an unfair division of work as a problem with women’s organizational skills?’

And then there’s the ‘AI Wife.’

I want to be careful here because I don’t want to replace one narrow definition of female ambition with another. Being a stay-at-home mother or father is incredibly valuable, fulfilling, and one of the most important contributions anyone can make to the future of humanity. Wanting to spend more time with your children, loving fashion, or using AI to make your daily life easier are all perfectly wonderful outcomes. I don’t believe every woman should aspire to build a billion-dollar company. That would just be another version of telling women what they’re supposed to want.

But it was pretty clear to me that the NYT wasn’t turning into a champion for the stay-at-home family maker either. When I reloaded the article, I was served another headline: ‘Maybe We All Need an A.I. Wife.’

Seriously? We’re putting Marissa Mayer next to the phrase ‘AI Wife’?

This framing manages to insult women in 2 different ways: This lowers the ceiling on ambitious professional women by suggesting that the primary use for technology with near-unimaginable potential is coordinating their home lives. But it also diminishes women who choose to dedicate themselves to their families, as though their contribution can be reduced to a collection of chores and replaced by AI.

Some women want to build companies. Others want to raise families. Some want both. Some want to pursue science, make art, travel, learn new skills, or simply have more time for themselves. The amazing opportunity for this technology shift is that it could expand the possibilities for all of the above.

That’s the story I wish we were telling.

I’ve seen what happens when women are given the tools to build.

I have the privilege of seeing a very different side of what women want from AI every day.

We just wrapped Season 4 of SheBuilds, Lovable’s women-focused hackathon. We had hundreds of women come together to turn their ideas into working products. I flippin love watching women realize that something they thought was impossible for them a few months ago is now completely doable.

And the products are so good!

In a previous season, Franziska Galiè built MedRamp, a tool to help travel nurses get up to speed when they arrive at a new hospital, reducing the onboarding burden on already overstretched healthcare teams.

Dr. Tracie Q. Gilbert built The CommYOUnity, a virtual community center to support Black teenage girls and the women raising them.

Meg O’Keefe created Playher, an AI-powered coaching platform designed around the specific development and training needs of girls in sports.

And that’s what gets me so emotional about this moment. For our whole lives and our moms’ lives and our grandmas’ lives, it’s been like this. Women have incredible ideas, expertise, and ambitions, but don’t have the access or resources to act on them.

In tech, maybe they couldn’t afford to hire engineers. Maybe they didn’t have connections to investors. Maybe they were raising children while working full-time and just didn’t have the bandwidth to start something on the side. Maybe they had been told so many times that technology wasn’t for them that they eventually believed it.

AI won’t solve all those problems. But for the first time, it can eliminate some of the barriers that prevented those women from even trying. The distance between having an idea and bringing it into the world is shrinking.

I think about my daughter when I see these women building. I want her to grow up in a world where she doesn’t have to think twice about whether she belongs in technology, whether she can start a company, or whether her ideas are worth pursuing. I want her to see women creating things that change the world and take for granted that she could be one of them.

And then I think about the stories she’ll read. The articles she’ll come across, the role models she’ll encounter, and the thousands of subtle messages she’ll absorb about what women are supposed to be good at. Because no matter how much I tell her that she can do anything, I can’t control the world she grows up in or the examples that world puts in front of her.

This is why I care so much.

I know my daughter is not gonna read one NYT article and decide her future belongs in shopping apps. But I know that what we repeatedly show girls as possible eventually has a huge effect on what they can imagine for themselves.

I want her to live in a world where women building companies, leading AI research, and making scientific breakthroughs aren’t surprising stories. They’re just stories.

And I want the media to help us get there.

So, New York Times, I hope the next time you ask what women want from AI, you’ll ask what we want to build, what we want to change, and what has been standing in our way. Talk to women across different industries, ages, backgrounds, and ambitions. Show the possibilities alongside the obstacles. Ask who gets to build this technology, who gets to benefit from it, and who still risks being left behind.

Because I don’t want AI to help women become better at being the women society expects them to be. I want AI to help women become whoever the fuck they want to be. That’s what I want from AI.

And my fellow women - please share what YOU want from AI, loud and proud. Today. Right now. Let’s Fucking GO.

Sincerely,

Elena

PS - And Marissa, if you read this: I know how it feels to be put under scrutiny and you’ve gotten a lot that’s unfair. But I hope you’ll join in to fight for other women to follow in your footsteps: Your career has been extraordinary. And that’s exactly the point. You are an exception, and I want AI to help make stories like yours less exceptional.