2026 Women’s Funding Network Summit: Shared Power – Women, Capital, and AI in the Global Economy
Spark Talk #1: The Future Is Being Designed. Who Gets to Shape It?
Sarita Gupta, Vice President of U.S. Programs, Ford Foundation
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For more than 40 years, the Women’s Funding Network has insisted that the dignity of women is inseparable from the survival of a just civic life. This network understood, long before mainstream philanthropy caught up, that investing in women is an investment in the institutional architecture of democracy itself. When visionary women organize capital, we can create one of the most durable engines of democratic renewal the world has ever seen. We need that courage today more than ever.
Consider the history of technology. In the middle of the 20th century, before a computer was a machine made of microchips, a “computer” was a person. More often than not, she was a woman. She sat at a desk with a pencil and paper, doing the painstaking mathematical work that launched rockets and organized modern industry.
Yet, as the historian of technology Mar Hicks has shown, women pioneered computing,— but the moment the field gained power, prestige, and capital, women were systematically pushed out. Their technical genius was downgraded to low-wage “clerical” work, while new management titles were handed to men.
This wasn’t an accident or an evolution. It was a choice.
Society has an exhausting habit of acting like technology is completely out of our hands, as if the future just lands on our doorstep and we have —no say. Once upon a time it was called industrial progress. Then it was called disruption. Today, we’re told that artificial intelligence will automatically lift all boats, and if workers are left behind, it’s because they failed to adapt.
But we know innovation has never automatically improved human lives. When the steam-powered loom transformed the 19th century, it didn’t create a thriving middle class. It created fortunes for a few owners, and 14 hour days in dangerous mills for everyone else. Shared prosperity and dignity had to be forced into the law by organized workers.
Today, the machines are faster, the automation is hungrier, and the surveillance is total. Algorithms track keystrokes, bathroom breaks, and even facial expressions. These tools undermine wages, schedules, and the grip people have over their lives. So the anxiety workers feel about AI isn’t paranoia. It’s history rhyming.
And we know these transitions fall hardest on women. While women make up 47% of the American workforce, we account for 83% of workers in jobs most vulnerable to automation: administrative assistants, customer service agents, medical coders, and municipal clerks. In gig nursing, algorithmic platforms already force nurses to bid down their own hourly wages just to win a shift. What this technology threatens to do to working-class women is what deindustrialization did to blue-collar men a generation ago. It’s a hollowing out of the middle class.
And the cruel irony is that advanced AI models depend on millions of low-paid, behind the scenes workers, predominantly women in the Global South, who label data and filter out violent content. These workers face psychological distress and low pay under precarious contracts. From design to deployment, these technologies are stripping working women of their economic dignity.
And when families lose their economic footing – communities fracture, trust in institutions collapses, and people begin to question whether democracy can deliver a decent life at all.
At the Ford Foundation, we believe economic justice requires workers to have power over the material conditions of their lives. Because technology has no soul, no will, no appetite. Algorithms don’t set the minimum wage themselves. Machines don’t decide who profits from productivity. Human beings make those choices. People design these systems, finance them, deploy them, and profit from them. And its people that can organize to change them.
Look at West Virginia in 2018. Across all 55 counties, public school educators walked out on strike. The final straw wasn’t just wages. It was an order forcing teachers to wear biometric tracking devices just to qualify for healthcare coverage. The state literally demanded their steps, heart rates, and sleep habits before guaranteeing their care. This wasn’t a “women’s issue”, but it targeted a workforce overwhelmingly powered by women.
And women organized in response. That digital overreach touched a raw nerve, and it sparked the #Red for Ed movement that shook the country around a range of issues impacting public education. That’s the magic of organizing: turning private indignity into public power. And that power is why the Women’s Funding Network must lead right now.
Philanthropy can’t keep gender funding in a small silo. Gender funding IS macroeconomic policy. It IS tech governance. It IS labor law, antitrust enforcement, and civic engagement. And above all, gender funding is democracy defense.
Democratic backsliding and the erosion of gender equality move in lockstep. Attacks on women’s rights are the earliest warnings that democratic norms are unraveling. And the rule of law means little if women can’t rely on it for safety and justice. Because safety isn’t just a private concern. It’s a condition for democracy.
For too long, violence against women has been treated as an isolated tragedy. But whether it’s targeted digital abuse including non-consensual deepfake imagery, automated stalking, and targeted harassment campaigns designed to drive women out of public office, or intimidation on the street and in workplaces, violence shrinks the public square.
And that coercion follows working women directly into the economy. A feminist labor agenda must broaden our understanding of what violence looks like in daily life. Violence is the extreme production quota that grinds down a human body until it breaks. Violence is the lethal reality of extreme heat in an unshaded field, a garment factory, or a solar installation site where water and rest are denied. Violence is the daily precarity facing two billion informal workers worldwide who labor without contracts, safety nets, or legal protection.
And it means confronting the systemic neglect of the care economy, which makes every other form of work possible. As feminist economist Nancy Folbre reminds us, our markets measure only what carries a price tag, and ignores the unpaid and underpaid care that sustains society.
But women are not just living in the problem of these compounding crises. We are authoring structural solutions. And we always have.
In 1948, when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drafted in Paris, it was Hansa Mehta of India who crossed out the phrase “All men are born free and equal” and replaced it with “All human beings are born free and equal.” She refused to allow a global charter of dignity to begin with a statement of erasure.
That same kind of authorship is transforming the world today:
● In New York the Model Alliance helped bring the Fashion Workers Act to life, which is setting the benchmark for protections against predatory contracts and AI exploitation in the fashion industry.
● In India, the Self-Employed Women’s Association created a parametric climate insurance program to protect street vendors and farmers from the financial devastation of extreme heat.
● Across Latin America, organizers moved the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to declare care a universal human right; one that protects those who need care, those who provide it, and our right to care for ourselves.
● Civil rights groups and AI researchers have challenged tech giants and won critical guardrails against AI tools that weaponize everyday photos of women into explicit deepfakes without their consent.
● From the United Nations to regional courts, feminist networks are replacing corporate self-regulation with enforceable rules, winning mandatory audits for gender-based harm and proving accountability is possible, even where global treaties lag behind.
● And across the globe, transnational women-led coalitions fought for historic treaties like ILO Conventions 190 and 193, guaranteeing that whether labor takes place on a factory floor, behind an app, or through an algorithm, workers have a fundamental right to safety, transparency, and freedom from violence or harassment.
That kind of authorship requires a radically different approach to building power, one that refuses to see people in pieces.
A few years ago I wrote a book with Erica Smiley, ED of Jobs with Justice, titled The Future We Need. Among many inspiring leaders, we profiled Deloris Wright, who organizes tenants in Brooklyn and domestic workers across New York. Deloris practices whole-person organizing. She knows that a worker is also a tenant facing eviction, a mother struggling with childcare, and a neighbor wondering if her vote even counts. She knows in her bones that you can’t separate the economy and democracy. Bread and freedom are cut from the same loaf.
THIS is the highest work of the Women’s Funding Network.
Our duty in philanthropy is to provide bold, patient, and unapologetic capital to the civic infrastructure where women organize, govern, and build power. When we support the whole person, we build a whole movement, one that connects gbv to wages, wages to technology, technology to healthcare, healthcare to housing, and economic power to civic power.
The Ford Foundation is proud to be part of the Women’s Funding Network, as we collectively back the organizers, the caregivers, the workers, and the visionaries who are building an economy worthy of human dignity, and a democracy that belongs to us all.
Thank you.