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AI Shows Promise and Peril for Women, Professor Claudia Flores Tells UN

Professor Claudia Flores, sitting at a table, speaks into a microphone
Clinical Professor Claudia Flores presents to the U.N. Human Rights Council.

A new report from a United Nations working group chaired by Professor Claudia Flores warns that the brisk growth of artificial intelligence may worsen existing gender inequalities and pose new risks to the human rights of women and girls worldwide.

“AI and digital technologies are reshaping the conditions under which women and girls exercise their rights,” the Working Group on Discrimination Against Women and Girls writes. “Without deliberate, gender-responsive governance, these systems risk amplifying exclusion, reinforcing harmful stereotypes, and exacerbating structural inequalities.”

Flores presented the report, “Women’s and Girls’ Rights and Artificial Intelligence and Related Digital Technologies,” to the U.N. Human Rights Council during its 62nd session at the United Nations Office in Geneva on June 24.

The report recognizes AI's potential for good for women and girls, including expanding access to education, healthcare, and economic opportunity. But AI can also entrench and amplify gender inequality, discrimination, and violence “invisibly, at scale, and beyond accountability,” Flores stressed when introducing the report.

The answer, according to the report, is regulation. Efforts by countries to regulate the technology have not kept up with AI’s fast expansion, Flores told the council. Self-regulation by corporations fails to address the experiences of women and girls, she added.

The working group identified three conditions for achieving substantive gender equality in the digital age: closing the digital divide, harnessing AI and digital technologies to bolster rather than undermine women's and girls’ human rights, and promoting women's and girls’ meaningful participation and leadership in public and political life. 

In her remarks, Flores urged the council to reject the notion that AI is too complex and fast-moving to regulate. She insisted that the world can chose to regulate AI to protect human rights.

The future of AI is being written and the choice of who it serves is ours to make.”

—Professor Claudia Flores

“AI is merely the latest step in human innovation and humanity has faced such moments before and found the capacity and the will to direct transformative technology towards the common good,” Flores said. “The future of AI is being written and the choice of who it serves is ours to make.”

Flores was appointed to the working group by the U.N.’s Human Rights Council in 2023, becoming chair in 2025. She last addressed the U.N. on behalf of the group in the fall. Composed of five independent experts, the working group has a mandate to intensify efforts to eliminate all forms of discrimination against women and girls throughout the world.

At Yale Law School, Flores is a clinical professor of law. She directs the Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic and is faculty co-director of the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights. Her teaching, scholarship, and practice center on international human rights, constitutional reform, global inequality, and state accountability.