Patriarchy has been around for millennia.  While there recently have been steps to reconstruct society and the workplace in a fairer way AI looks set to reinforce patriarchal practices and make them stronger.

One of the most iconic Cosmopolitan magazine editors Marcelle d’Argy Smith published a book of essays, in the latter years of the last century, one of which took a satirical look at modern life from the perspective of gender politics. 

She described a fictional universe where women at work at a building site whistled at men passing, where posters exclusively featured semi-naked men posing and where power rested firmly in the hands of women.  Back then of course this was unimaginable.

The recent iconic movie Barbie played with the same idea.  In Barbie’s utopian world everything is designed for and governed by women.  Women, well Barbies anyway, hold all the positions of power, own property and take the lead in society, while men, or at least Kens, are sidelined.  Of course, once Ken gets a glimpse of real life American society, he disrupts this universe, at least until (spoiler alert) the Barbies realise the Kens’ Achilles Heel, (it is being gazed at admiringly of course) and reclaim power in Barbie Land, whilst moving towards a more inclusive and diverse society, well amongst Barbies and Kens anyway.

There are only a few matriarchal structures in history that we know of.  The accounts of them were written by men (for example The Amazons legends in Greek mythology) and women generally don’t come out of those histories positively.

Fictional accounts of societies run by women rarely end well.

It is in fact impossible to imagine what life would be like in a world where the predominant cultural imperative was feminine.

It is in fact impossible to imagine what the culture at work would be in that situation too.

Ten years on from the publication of The Glass Wall, success strategies for women at work and businesses that mean business, my co-author Kathryn Jacob OBE and I have been working on a revised edition for 2026.  You heard it here first! One of the striking comments that one interviewee made ten years ago (out of many extremely interesting interviews) has stayed with me.  The entrepreneur Baroness Martha Lane Fox commented that it was a surprise to her, back in 2015, that the tech industry, still quite youthful compared to say banking or government, was so patriarchal in practices and senior executives’ appointments. You might expect it, she thought, from businesses that had their roots in the time when women either had to chose between a career and being a mother, or indeed had no choice at all because only a very few professions were open to women.  But in businesses that had grown up this century – how unexpected. 

Tech doesn’t seem to have become much more balanced globally in terms of gender at the top in the last decade. 

Whilst there are more women in some very significant roles in the UK the gender pay gap in our industry increased in the latest figures according to the IPA Census.

To echo Lane-Fox, a decade on, it is a shame that the latest new tech is set to amplify heritage business practices still further.

Last month Sky News revealed that AI is driving a “distortion of reality” in how women are perceived.

Researchers generated 40,000 CVs and had them rated by AI. They found that AI assumed that women were younger and less experienced, and rated men as more qualified.  The researchers (from the University of California) also studied over a million images and videos and LLMs for representations of women at work online.  They discovered that women are systematically presented as younger than men in job roles and social positions.  One of the authors of this study, Selene Delecourt, draws a link in terms of this bias to the way in which women in senior roles are still referred to as girls.  She believes that all of this feeds the stereotypical notions that shape perception at work.  The distortion is most extreme in high-status, high-earning occupations. 

There is a centre of gravity in gender and it is not an equal one between men and women.  When times get tough this bias escalates.  It will take concrete conscious action to reset things for the next generation. Watch out for our book in 2026 where we will reveal striking new stories and information.  And if you have any comments on the current status quo at work, please reach out to us on LinkedIn.