I want to talk about the community behind this book, because the book doesn’t exist without it and the community deserves more than a byline.
Start with the numbers, because they’re worth sitting with. Women make up 22% of the global AI workforce. At senior leadership level, that figure drops to under 14%. So the people making the key decisions about how AI systems are designed, deployed, and communicated to everyday users are, by a significant majority, not the people those systems are built to serve. That gap doesn’t stay contained to the boardroom.
It travels into the product, into the interface, into the assumptions baked into what the system does and doesn’t account for. Talent500 research found that 52% of women in tech report observing gender bias in generative AI tools. That’s not coincidence. That’s what happens when design rooms lack the range of perspectives needed to catch what a homogeneous team normalises.
SheWritesAI exists, in part, as a structural response to that problem.
The origin story is worth knowing. Karen Smiley, the community’s founder, saw a Substack post listing ten people to follow on AI. All ten were men. She messaged the author privately, pointed it out, and offered a starter list of the 34 women she was already following. That moment planted a seed.
By December 2024, she launched SheWritesAI as a directory. By early March 2026, the community had grown to over 600 women and nonbinary writers from more than 60 countries, all writing seriously about AI and data. The growth wasn’t manufactured. It reflected something real: there was no shortage of women doing this work. There was simply a shortage of visibility.
AI Everywhere, Vol. 1 is the community’s first book, and it’s been built with the same intentionality that shaped the community itself. The premise is that AI is more than a technology story. It’s a human one. So the book centres human experience across every chapter, looking at how AI affects real people in their daily lives and work, where it helps, where it causes harm, and what it would take to shape what comes next more deliberately.
Twenty-six women and nonbinary writers from 14 countries approach those questions from their own domains. Educators, designers, ethicists, technologists, and practitioners writing from across five continents, each bringing a perspective shaped by where they work and what they’ve seen. The chapters span automotive AI, empathy and inclusive UX design, cybersecurity, agriculture, education, creativity, healthcare, ethics, and the everyday experience of living with systems that are making increasingly consequential decisions on our behalf.
The practical dimension matters to me particularly. This isn’t a book that stops at observation. Each chapter moves toward something actionable, frameworks, questions, ways of navigating AI that are grounded in real professional and lived experience. That’s a harder thing to write than analysis, and it reflects the calibre of the contributors.
What strikes me about the model is how seriously it takes both quality and representation at the same time, rather than treating them as competing priorities. Contributors are expected to have published substantial AI-related content. Chapters are selected to ensure diverse global and intersectional perspectives. The peer review process is real, with authors supporting each other’s chapters and improving the work collectively. For a first book produced entirely by volunteers, that level of rigour is not a given. It reflects something about the culture of the community itself.
I think about this in the context of my own work often. The design and technology industries have a long history of producing frameworks and points of view that get attributed to a small number of names operating in a fairly narrow set of contexts. The work of practitioners in other parts of the world, with different constraints and different stakes, tends to stay less visible even when it’s just as rigorous. Sometimes more so, because working with fewer resources and less institutional backing tends to sharpen your thinking considerably.
A book that holds conversations about automotive AI in the UK alongside AI in Kenyan agriculture, Indonesian education, healthcare across the DRC, and creativity in Mexico is doing something a single-author book structurally cannot. It’s demonstrating, in the most practical way possible, that the conversation about AI is bigger, richer, and more geographically distributed than the mainstream discourse tends to suggest. And it’s giving those voices a platform that belongs to them rather than one granted by invitation on someone else’s terms.
A second volume is already in planning for late 2026. If you’re a woman or nonbinary person writing seriously about AI, the community is worth knowing about, not just because of the book, but because of what it means to be in a room where this conversation is happening at this level of honesty, care, and collective ambition.
You can find the community at shewritesai.substack.com and the book at shewritesai.org, or buy it directly on Amazon.
