Most Powerful Women in Technology to Follow in 2027
Researchers, founders and operators leading in AI and technology in 2027 — the updated edition of one of Engatica's most-linked listicles.
AI jobs are among the best-paid in the economy — a typical US posting lists around $177,000 — yet women took just 26% of AI hires in 2025, against 50% of hires in non-AI roles, and hold only 13% of C-suite AI leadership jobs. The women on this list are the exception that proves what is possible: lab directors, founders and chief executives who are setting the technical and commercial direction of the field. We verify every entry against current sources, because a list like this is only worth reading if it is still true.
There is movement underneath the headline numbers: women's share of people listing AI engineering skills rose from 23.5% in 2018 to 29.4% in 2025, with the gap narrowing in 74 of 75 economies (World Economic Forum, 2025). But women are still only 28% of founders, and just 8.7% of women founders list AI engineering skills, against 14.7% of men (WEF, Global Gender Gap Report 2026). This list names the women already past those filters.
| Name | Known as | Follow for |
|---|---|---|
| Fei-Fei Li | Stanford HAI co-director; co-founder & CEO, World Labs | Computer vision, human-centred AI |
| Joy Buolamwini | Algorithmic Justice League founder | Algorithmic bias |
| Timnit Gebru | DAIR Institute founder | AI ethics |
| Kate Crawford | Author, Atlas of AI | AI politics and labour |
| Melanie Mitchell | Santa Fe Institute professor | AI concepts |
| Cassie Kozyrkov | CEO, Kozyr | Decision intelligence |
| Allie Miller | CEO, Open Machine | Enterprise AI |
| Daniela Braga | Founder, Defined.ai | Speech and language data |
| Aarthi Ramamurthy | Founder, Schema; ex-Meta, Netflix | Product and community |
| Mutale Nkonde | CEO, AI For the People | AI policy and equity |
| Deborah Raji | UC Berkeley researcher; Mozilla fellow | AI auditing |
| Sasha Luccioni | Co-founder & Chief Scientific Officer, Sustainable AI Group | Sustainable AI |
| Emily M. Bender | Professor, University of Washington | NLP and linguistic ethics |
| Margaret Mitchell | Researcher, Hugging Face; ex-Google | AI ethics |
| Rumman Chowdhury | CEO, Humane Intelligence | Responsible AI auditing |
| Meredith Whittaker | President, Signal | Privacy, AI Now co-founder |
| Sarah Myers West | Managing Director, AI Now Institute | AI policy |
| Amba Kak | Executive Director, AI Now Institute | Tech policy |
| Hannah Fry | Professor, Cambridge; broadcaster | Mathematics and data in public life |
| Anne-Marie Imafidon | Co-founder, Stemettes | Women in STEM advocacy |
| Sue Black | Professor, Durham University | Tech evangelism, Bletchley Park campaign |
| Anne Boden | Starling Bank founder; founder, AI by Boden | Fintech |
| Poppy Gustafsson | Former CEO, Darktrace; former UK Minister of State for Investment; RUSI trustee | AI cybersecurity, tech investment |
| Joelle Pineau | Chief AI Officer, Cohere; McGill professor | Reinforcement learning |
| Raquel Urtasun | Founder, Waabi; Toronto professor | Self-driving AI and robotaxis |
| Anima Anandkumar | Professor, Caltech; co-founder, Accelerated Understanding; ex-NVIDIA | ML for science |
| Regina Barzilay | Professor, MIT | AI for healthcare |
| Daphne Koller | Founder, insitro; Stanford professor | ML for drug discovery |
| Jennifer Doudna | Nobel laureate; Innovative Genomics Institute | CRISPR and biotech |
| Emmanuelle Charpentier | Nobel laureate; Max Planck Unit | CRISPR science |
| Reshma Saujani | Founder, Girls Who Code | Girls in computing |
| Kimberly Bryant | Founder, Black Girls CODE | Tech inclusion |
| Mira Murati | Founder, Thinking Machines Lab; ex-CTO OpenAI | Frontier AI products |
| Daniela Amodei | President, Anthropic | Frontier AI companies |
| Lila Ibrahim | COO, Google DeepMind | AI operations |
| Chelsea Finn | Professor, Stanford; co-founder, Physical Intelligence | Robot learning |
| Radha Basu | CEO, iMerit | Data operations |
| Padmasree Warrior | Former CTO, Cisco | Enterprise technology leadership |
| Safra Catz | Executive Vice Chair, Oracle | Enterprise software |
| Julie Sweet | CEO, Accenture | Technology consulting |
| Arundhati Bhattacharya | Former Chairperson, SBI; Salesforce India | Banking and digital transformation |
| Debjani Ghosh | Distinguished Fellow, NITI Aayog | India's tech industry, frontier tech policy |
| Nivruti Rai | Former Intel India head; Invest India CEO | Semiconductors and investment |
| Rekha Menon | Former Chairperson, Accenture India | Future of work |
| Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw | Founder, Biocon | Biotech entrepreneurship |
| Yejin Choi | Professor of Computer Science & HAI Senior Fellow, Stanford | Machine common sense, NLP |
| Daniela Rus | Director, MIT CSAIL; co-founder, Liquid AI | Robotics, efficient AI models |
| Francesca Rossi | IBM Fellow; IBM Global Leader for AI Ethics | AI ethics and governance |
| Virginia Dignum | Professor of Responsible AI, Umeå University | Responsible AI and governance |
Reading the list
The through-line is how much of frontier AI runs through these careers: the heads of safety institutes that audit the models, the founders building the labs, the professors whose students staff them, and the operators turning research into products used at national scale. If you are building a syllabus, a conference panel or a hiring shortlist, start here — and send us the names we missed.
Frequently asked questions
How many women work in AI in 2026?
Fewer than the pay would suggest. LinkedIn research published in August 2026 found women took just 26% of AI hires in 2025, against 50% of hires into non-AI roles, and hold 20% of Head of AI roles and 13% of C-suite AI leadership roles. A typical US AI job posting lists around $177,000 — which makes the gap an economic issue, not just a representational one.
Is the gender gap in AI narrowing?
Slowly, from a low base. The World Economic Forum found women's share of people listing AI engineering skills rose from 23.5% in 2018 to 29.4% in 2025, with the gap narrowing in 74 of 75 economies. But women are still only 28% of founders overall, and just 8.7% of women founders list AI engineering skills, against 14.7% of men.
What changed in the 2027 edition?
Every entry was re-verified, and four roles had gone stale: Joelle Pineau is now Cohere's Chief AI Officer, Safra Catz is Oracle's executive vice chair rather than CEO, Sasha Luccioni co-founded the Sustainable AI Group, and Debjani Ghosh is a Distinguished Fellow at NITI Aayog. Four names also joined, including Stanford's Yejin Choi and MIT CSAIL director Daniela Rus — 49 women in total.
How do I suggest someone for the list?
Use our nominations page. We look for women setting the technical or commercial direction of the field — lab directors, founders, chief executives and senior researchers with current, verifiable work — and we check every suggestion against published sources before adding it. The list is refreshed for each new edition, and corrections to existing entries are welcome the same way.
Sources
- Joëlle Pineau — Wikipedia, 2026
- Joelle Pineau joins Cohere as Chief AI Officer — Wired24, 2025
- Oracle names co-CEOs as Safra Catz moves to executive vice chair — CIO Dive, 2025
- Sustainable AI Group coverage (Luccioni as co-founder/chief scientific officer) — Trellis, 2026
- Debjani Ghosh steps down as NASSCOM president — Exchange4Media, 2024
- Debjani Ghosh joins NITI Aayog as Distinguished Fellow — Digital Terminal, 2025
- Poppy Gustafsson, Baroness Gustafsson — Wikipedia, 2026
- Poppy Gustafsson joins RUSI as trustee — RUSI, 2025
- Anne Boden — profile — FinTech Magazine, 2026
- Anne Boden sells remaining Starling stake — KMFM / Sky News, 2026
- Chelsea Finn / Physical Intelligence $600M raise — Women in Robotics, 2025
- Physical Intelligence raises $600M at $5.6B — Teardown.ai, 2025
- Waabi raises $1B and expands into robotaxis with Uber — TechCrunch, 2026
- Anima Anandkumar — speaker profile — SC26, 2026
- Anima Anandkumar joins UN Scientific Advisory Board; TIME100 AI 2026 — American Bazaar Online, 2026
- Tinker launches recap — One Year Ago in AI, 2026
- Accenture FY2026 results — Julie Sweet statement — Pulse2, 2026
- Hannah Fry appointed first Professor of the Public Understanding of Mathematics — University of Cambridge, 2025
- NVIDIA's Yejin Choi joins Stanford HAI — Business Wire, 2025
- AI researcher Yejin Choi leaves Univ. of Washington and Allen Institute for AI — GeekWire, 2024
- Daniela Rus named to TIME100 AI list for 2026 — Stellant Group, 2026
- MIT CSAIL and Pegatron launch five-year initiative — MIT CSAIL, 2025
- The ethicist's rule: never let the machine take the blame — Francesca Rossi — IBM Think, 2026
- Francesca Rossi — person page — Columbia University SPS, 2026
- New AI Ethics book series tackles the hard questions (AAAI/CRC Press, eds. Rossi and Dignum) — Scienmag, 2026
- New LinkedIn research finds women account for just 26% of AI hires — LinkedIn News, 2026
- Women are significantly underrepresented in the AI workforce — HR Dive, 2026
- Gender Parity in the Intelligent Age — World Economic Forum, 2025
- Global Gender Gap Report 2026 — World Economic Forum, 2026
- Cisco invests in World Labs — Cisco Newsroom, 2025