"Gender, Empire and Al" is a symposium and design workshop to both reflect on critical questions and design generative paths forward to addressing them. The day will start with a keynote by award-winning journalist and MIT alumna, Karen Hao, on her book "Empire of Al". Select MIT faculty will facilitate discussion groups to unpack problems outlined in Hao’s talk and possible solutions. Over lunch, we will hear from our second keynote speaker, Paola Ricaurte, who leads the Latin American Feminist Al Research Network and was named as one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in Al in 2025. In the afternoon, we will hold hands-on design workshops to tackle specific issues like reproductive justice, Al and propaganda, and biases in medical imaging. We believe that together we can solve complex issues and generate more just and feminist visions for Al and society. For more information, to register, and questions regarding accessibility, contact wgs@mit.edu..

This event is free and open to the public with priority to the MIT community. Registration is required.

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Keynote Speakers

Karen Hao was formerly a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, covering American and Chinese tech companies, and a senior editor for AI at MIT Technology Review. Her work has been cited by Congress, featured in university curriculums, and remade into museum exhibits. She has won numerous accolades, including an American Humanist Media Award and a National Magazine Award for Journalists Under 30. Karen also sits on the AI advisory board of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. Prior to journalism, she was an application engineer at the first startup to spin out of Google, and she received a B.S. in mechanical engineering and minor in energy studies from MIT.

In Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI (Penguin Press, 2025), Karen, the first journalist to ever profile OpenAI, tells the behind-the-scenes story of how a cadre of the most powerful companies in human history is reshaping the world in its image. “Excellent and deeply reported” (The New York Times), Empire of AI is an “essential work of public education” (Zuboff), “a bestselling page-turner that has made waves not just in Silicon Valley but around the world” (TIME), and a revelatory portrait of the people controlling this technology. It is the jaw-dropping story of ambition and ego, hype and speculation, plunder and destruction, politics and labor, and, of course, money and power—a brilliant and deeply necessary look at the industry defining our era, and what the future holds.

Paola Ricaurte is a full professor at Tecnológico de Monterrey and a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. She is the co-founder of Tierra Común, an academic and activist network committed to decolonizing data, and leads the Latin American and Caribbean Feminist AI Network. Her work bridges academia, activism, innovation and policymaking, with a central focus on human rights from decolonial and feminist perspectives. Paola serves on several international expert committees, including the Global Partnership on AI (GPAI), UNESCO’s AI Ethics Experts Without Borders (AIEB), and the Women for Ethical AI (W4EAI) platform. She was included in the 2025 TIME100 AI list of the most influential people in artificial intelligence.

This event was made possible by MIT Womens’s and Gender Studies, MIT Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing, MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing, MIT EECS, MIT LIDS | Laboratory for Information & Decision Systems, AI For Society Group, MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, MIT Radius, HCI Seminar, MIT Data + Feminism Lab, MIT Anthropology, MIT Philosophy, MIT Literature, MIT Social Algorithms, MIT Political Economy Lab, MIT Knight Science Journalism, and MIT Program in Science, Technology and Society