Could AI reduce barriers for women in entrepreneurship?

Turning a promising idea into a credible start-up can take time and come with a steep price tag. A founder might need a designer to create a brand, a developer to build a prototype, a market researcher to test demand and an accountant to model the numbers.

Now, they can use AI to make a first pass at many of those tasks.

Professor Christine Woods at Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland says this could be particularly significant for women.

Chris has spent more than two decades researching and teaching entrepreneurship. She holds the inaugural Theresa Gattung Chair for Women and Entrepreneurship, directs the Aotearoa Centre for Enterprising Women and works closely with the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE).

One of AI’s potential benefits, she says, is making a range of tasks more accessible.

“It can give a founder help with so many things: drafting, analysis, research, financial modelling, basic coding and translating jargon. Help that used to depend on who you knew or what you could afford.”

For women who have been discouraged from technical fields, the ability to develop an idea without extensive technical skills, industry connections or financial resources could be particularly valuable.

“AI may also help with another resource many women have less of: time.”

By taking on routine administrative, research and drafting tasks, it has the potential to create additional capacity for founders balancing businesses with parenting, caring for family members and other unpaid work.

But the risk, says Chris, is that this time simply gets absorbed into more output: more emails, more expectations, more work.

Another opportunity lies in how AI can support learning.

Chris uses AI as a research partner when approaching unfamiliar subjects - testing her understanding and identifying what she needs to explore.

For an emerging entrepreneur, tools like Claude or ChatGPT can offer a private space to ask questions that might feel embarrassing in other situations.

“AI lets people experiment, get things wrong and iterate before they go public.”
AI, however, can also confidently get things wrong.

Its outputs reflect the data it’s trained on, including a history of entrepreneurship that Chris describes as overwhelmingly male, Western and well-capitalised.

Founders, she says, need to challenge outputs, recognise whose experiences might be missing, and know when to talk to an expert.

“Technology may make skills, knowledge and experimentation more accessible, but it doesn’t address many of the structural factors that shape entrepreneurial success, including education, access to investment, professional networks and the distribution of caring responsibilities.

“You can have a beautifully built prototype and a polished pitch deck, but if the investors in the room don’t back women, or you’re not in the room at all, the funding gap persists.”

Much of Chris’ wider work has focused on these structural barriers, including access to entrepreneurial finance, mentoring, allyship and networks.

In a recent editorial published in the International Journal of Gender and Entrepreneurship, Chris argues that entrepreneurship education continues to favour a traditional image of the entrepreneur: male, individualistic, competitive, risk-taking and focused on rapid business growth.

Rather than simply encouraging more women to participate in existing programmes, she argues that entrepreneurship education itself needs to change.

“If we want more women to see entrepreneurship as a possibility, we need to rethink how we teach it and what we recognise as success. AI could be part of that, giving women opportunities to explore ideas, experiment and get started.”