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Across clinics, classrooms, city halls, and financial systems, women continue doing the uncredited work of governing AI: deciding when systems can be trusted, paused, refused, and repaired. Governing the Default names this work as relational governance, demonstrating how leaders can turn critique of AI’s extractive norms into operational practice. Bringing together industry and academic contributors, the volume reframes organizational care as governance designed into decision rights, feedback loops, oversight, and repair. Its copy-ready practices help leaders, educators, and policymakers replace opaque defaults with consent-first, benefit-sharing, repair-ready systems.
The most interesting interventions do not simply critique existing systems; they change our ability to perceive them. Gender, Power, and Emerging Technology does exactly that, showing how questions of care, consent, refusal, and repair belong at the heart of governance rather than at its periphery. In doing so, it bridges knowing and acting, making this an intellectually generous and practically ambitious collection.
— Minna Salami, author and social critic
Gender, Power, and Emerging Technology: Governing the Default shows that technology governance is also an evaluative question: whose knowledge counts, whose context matters, and who has authority to name harm, success, and repair. By centering African, Indigenous, feminist, and justice-centered ways of knowing, this volume challenges the epistemic violence of technological defaults and offers practical pathways for more accountable governance.
— Professor Bagele Chilisa, University of Botswana
This book is a very important and timely contribution to the AI governance debate, adding an essential feminist and relational lens. It moves beyond theoretical discussion to offer practical tools that can be adopted now in this rapidly developing field.
— Caroline Green, Institute for Ethics in AI, University of Oxford
Too often AI tools are handed to clinicians with great attention to accuracy and almost none to how decisions actually get made at the bedside. This volume treats that gap as the central governance problem and offers concrete tools for building validation, workflow integration, and the authority to pause or refuse into the systems themselves. It is timely, and it is genuinely usable.
— Max Topaz, Columbia University and VNS Health
We are heading into unknown waters as AI begins to envelop and redesign the boats we are all sailing. The history of technological development suggests that the optimistic promises made by advocates of change are seldom evenly distributed, nor are their effects universally benign. This book demonstrates both why that is the case and how we might collectively construct responsible governance systems by reconceptualizing what consent and resistance mean — and how we might lead that movement.
— Keith Grint, Emeritus Professor, Warwick Business School
Gender, Power, and Emerging Technology makes an important contribution to feminist digital justice by refusing to treat AI governance as a narrow technical or compliance problem. Haskell and the contributors show how data and AI systems reproduce power when questions of care, consent, accountability, refusal, and repair are subordinated to scale, efficiency, and market-led innovation. The volume offers a timely vocabulary for governance that centers democratic participation, social justice, gender equality, and the knowledge of communities most affected by technological change. If need a tightened version: Gender, Power, and Emerging Technology makes an important contribution to feminist digital justice by refusing to treat AI governance as a narrow technical or compliance problem. Haskell and the contributors show how data and AI systems reproduce power when care, consent, accountability, refusal, and repair are subordinated to scale, efficiency, and market-led innovation.
— Anita Gurumurthy, IT for Change
At a time when AI debates are dominated by hype and fear, this book offers something far more valuable: practical ways to build technologies that center care, accountability, and inclusion. This work moves beyond abstract AI ethics to confront the deeper questions of power by drawing attention to whose knowledge counts and whose voices shape our technological futures. This timely volume offers a compelling roadmap for more inclusive and responsible innovation.
— Payal Arora, author and digital cultures scholar
This is an important offering from the voices, perspectives, and clarity that have not been part of our understanding or policy decisions, here applied to the massive cultural shifts introduced by AI and new technologies. Always, those marginalized, trivialized, and ignored have clearer vision; not only do they name the dynamics and issues, they experience them. Usually silenced, here women use their direct experience combined with brilliant scholarship to sharpen a lens not available elsewhere. They see deeply into the dynamics, the systemic relationships, and cultural blindness now being exposed with new technologies. May we use this clarity to change our minds and behaviors.
— Margaret J. Wheatley, author and leadership thinker
The hideous mantra ‘move fast and break things’ has become the governing ideology of a technological oligarchy that remains largely white, male, overconfident, and insulated from the consequences of its own creations. Most people have little control over the systems these actors impose on society, and marginalized communities are too often left to absorb the damage. Gender, Power, and Emerging Technology explains why this pattern must be reversed: those most affected by a system should have real authority in governing it. Every chapter offers not only a theoretical critique of what is wrong with modern technologies, but practical recommendations for how institutions can make care, accountability, and repair part of their design. I hope it will be read widely.
— Alberto Cairo, University of Miami
Gender, Power, and Emerging Technology extends the inclusion conversation into one of the most urgent leadership challenges of our time: how organizations design the systems in which people are seen, heard, and able to exercise judgment. Haskell and the contributors show that belonging is not only an interpersonal aspiration; it depends on whether people can surface evidence, question defaults, challenge bias, and participate in repairing the systems that shape opportunity and harm.
— Stefanie K. Johnson, University of Colorado Boulder
The centralization of AI power in the hands of a small number of mostly male technology leaders is a danger to society. To turn the tide, books like this are vital. We need to raise awareness of the issues of power, gender, and accountability — and we also need practical toolkits and governance guidance to address them. Gender, Power, and Emerging Technology: Governing the Default is a timely reflection on the imbalance shaping the AI industry and a useful resource for leaders and institutions.
— Andy Cotgreave, data storytelling practitioner
Gender, Power, and Emerging Technology powerfully shows that women’s leadership is not only a matter of representation, but a form of stewardship: bringing relational knowledge, accountability, and repair into the systems that shape technological life. This volume moves beyond principles by offering practical tools that help leaders recognize how power operates in emerging technologies and redesign institutions around care, responsibility, and repair. A timely and essential resource for anyone committed to responsible innovation and women’s leadership.
— Susan R. Madsen, Utah State University
Power, accountability, and responsibility lie at the heart of this book. It explores whether increasingly powerful AI systems can be governed—and asks who pays the price when they fail.
— Kat Greenbrook, Rogue Penguin
As institutions welcome AI into classrooms and advising relationships, this book asks the question school leaders cannot afford to skip: what happens to care and mentorship when a machine is listening instead of us? Tricia Friedman’s chapter on companion AI and the future of friendship makes a distinctive contribution here, naming ‘relational drift’ as a sovereignty issue for schools rather than a matter of individual student choice. The volume as a whole gives educators practical tools for keeping accountability, not just innovation, at the center of the decision.
— Nicole Brittingham Furlonge, Teachers College, Columbia University
This crucial book unmasks the systemic blind spots of modern technological governance, revealing how algorithmic systems shift burdens onto those closest to the impact. It is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand how institutions must change what they count as evidence in order to ensure true accountability, justice, and repair.
— Dresden Farrand, International Leadership Association
“Gender, Power, and Emergent Technology: Governing the Default lays bare how AI and other emerging technologies can reproduce harm when governance arrives too late. By centering the voices and authority of those most often marginalized by dominant systems, the contributors make a strong case for responsible, inclusive, and sustainable AI innovation. This timely volume helps readers understand the peril of growth without accountability — and the governance work required to prevent harm from becoming the default.”
— Ruchika Malhotra, author and inclusion strategist
Christine Haskell, Ph.D., is a scholar-practitioner and advisor specializing in AI/data governance, leadership, and values-based decision-making.
Introduction; Christine Haskell
Chapter 1. Ethics as Fermentation: Ubuntu and Ma’at as Measures of Relational Intelligence Needed to Continually Govern Fair and Inclusive AI Futures; Wakanyi Macharia-Hoffman and Annette Markham
Chapter 2. Herstory as Analytic Lens: Absence, Distortion, and the Politics of Knowledge in Large Language Models; Kira Sjöberg
Chapter 3. Governing the Heart of the Machine: Redesigning AI Safety When Institutions Parent Through Parents; Christine Haskell and Leah Jacobs
Chapter 4. Is Friendship A Technology? Governing Relational Drift with ScenarioSHIFT; Tricia Friedman
Chapter 5. AI Doesn't Mentor Like We Do: Latina Cultural Wisdom and the Future of Human-Centered Leadership; Emi Barresi
Chapter 6. Beyond Bias: Charting Feminist Futures for AI-Powered Women’s Health; Johnna D. Wesley, Heather Stegner, and Heather Ward
Chapter 7. Empowering Women by Governing Legibility: Redressing Protocol for Fintech and Green Finance in Nigeria; Nubi Achebo
Chapter 8. AI Governance is Hyperlocal: A Participatory Framework for Ethical Artificial Intelligence Adoption in Local Government; Sarah Bland