Event: What are the resources we need to navigate AI, gender and MERL?

Allison Sambo and Kecia Bertermann

In January 2025, we kicked off the Gender, MERL and AI working group. Over 300 people attended, excited to share areas of interest and issues that formed the basis of our 2025 roadmap. Throughout the year, this working group discussed whether AI promotes Gender Equity or Automates Inequality, learned about what building a feminist AI can look like, and talked about detecting gender bias in AI tools. Our events included: 

• Reviewing use cases of Gen AI for women’s economic empowerment, health, and tech-facilitated violence. This session included a paper written by Medhavi Hassija and our co-lead, Savita Bailur. 
• Explorations of AI-enabled accountability tools, led by Eva Blum-Dumontet, Head of Movement Building and Policy at Chayn. who spoke on the project “Survivor AI,” a feminist AI initiative to empower survivors of image-based abuse. 
• Evaluating LLMs for accuracy and inclusion, with Temina Madon (from The Agency Fund), Mala Kumar and Sarah Amos (from Humane Intelligence), and Tarunima Prabhakar (from Tattle). 
• A discussion on bias, led by Annie Brown, CEO of Reliabl, and Gender Insights founder Kamila Wasilkowska.

As the world of AI and gender continues to evolve rapidly, for our first event of 2026, we want to invite working group members to join us in a collective exercise to map out the resources they have found useful to navigate AI, gender and MERL.

We’re inviting participants to bring 1-2 resources that have helped you in answering some of your questions and challenges – or provoked more questions! This could be any format: research, toolkits, reports, videos, podcasts. Through this process, we hope to facilitate knowledge sharing across the group and spot any areas where we see gaps. Join us on March 26! 

We will also be joined by our new co-lead, Kecia Bertermann.  Kecia is Associate Partner at Itad and leads the philanthropy support team. She supports Foundations with strategy development, facilitating reflection, and embedding strategic learning processes that facilitate collective action in dynamic contexts. Prior to joining Itad, Kecia was Director for Impact and Learning at Luminate, where she led evidence and learning across a diverse global portfolio. Kecia brings deep expertise in using strategy, evidence, and learning to support complex systems change. She is also experienced in the digital, gender, and MEL space, having served as Director of Digital Research and Learning at Girl Effect while also leading research on the digital divide and adolescence & cognitive science.