Safeguarding Women and Girls in the Age of AI : Shared by Tom McDermott

It is good to see that the Lancet is giving strong attention to this issue.  Although the editorial supports the work done by UN Women, the question of AI's use for child sexual abuse and exploitation has also been a major one for UNICEF, including the recent Innocenti Issue Brief.  

Safeguarding Women and Girls in the Age of AI 

The Lancet Global Health The Lancet Global Health, March 2026 

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As artificial intelligence technologies become increasingly embedded in global health research and practice, they present both opportunities and serious risks for women and girls. The recent Grok AI scandal — involving the non-consensual creation and dissemination of explicit sexual images of women and girls through generative AI — illustrated how rapidly these tools can be weaponized. UN Women has documented growing use of AI to facilitate online abuse against women, including harassment, stalking, and the non-consensual sharing or manipulation of intimate images, with the scale and speed of AI-generated harmful content posing particular dangers to women and girls in low-resource settings, where legal and technical protections are weakest.

Beyond digital violence, the editorial highlights risks embedded in AI health tools built on biased or incomplete data. 

Research in this issue by Nyashadzaishe Mafirakureva and colleagues finds that the absence of pregnancy-specific data in tuberculosis surveillance means that women's risk of developing TB during pregnancy and the postpartum period is frequently underestimated — a pattern that could be replicated across AI-driven health systems that exclude or under-represent women in training datasets.

The editorial calls for cross-disciplinary collaboration to embed gender and sex sensitivity into every stage of AI development, ensuring women and marginalized groups participate in the design, governance, and evaluation of health technologies. It also urges government policy responses to adapt as new forms of technology-facilitated violence emerge.

Quote: "By championing justice and meaningful participation, the global health community can leverage AI to accelerate progress towards gender and sex equity in health, ensuring that no woman or girl is left behind."