Pretty much every International Women’s Day I find myself reflecting on the pace of change in our industry. This year my thoughts have focused more on what the rise of AI means for equity and representation in technology.

I have worked in tech for 12 years. There has been progress in that time, but not nearly enough. Despite progress, the industry remains heavily male dominated (more than 70 percent male in the UK), and that imbalance starts early.

Every year when I help facilitate work experience for computer science students, only around 4 percent are female. That pipeline problem has not shifted at the pace many of us hoped, or that it needs to.

At the same time, AI is reshaping how decisions are made. It is changing how software is built, how teams are hired and how we interact with technology. It helps us move faster, test ideas earlier and automate processes. It offers real opportunity. But like the world around us, AI is not neutral. It learns from historic data, and that data reflects existing inequalities. If we are not careful, we risk scaling bias at speed. In many ways, that is already happening.

And that raises another uncomfortable question. Do the people making many of these decisions even care?

For founders investing in AI to drive growth, this is not a theoretical issue. If you are building tools that influence hiring, triage, financial decisions or customer access, you need to ask hard questions. Who trained this model? What data was used? How are you testing for bias? Who is in the room when you decide what “good” looks like? Responsible innovation is not about slowing down. It is about building confidently, with clarity about the risks.

International Women’s Day is a reminder that representation still matters. If only a small fraction of future engineers are women, the systems they build will reflect a narrow set of experiences. The answer is not to shy away from AI, but to approach it with intent. We need to actively build diverse teams and challenge assumptions.

At DabApps, that mindset shapes how we approach the software we build with our clients. Technology decisions have real-world consequences, so responsibility has to be part of the process, not an afterthought.

Progress doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when leaders decide it matters, in the teams they build and the systems they choose to create.