Women’s Legal Inequality Is Structural. How AI Transformation Can Change This.

Last month, the World Bank released its annual flagship Women, Business and the Law report. For the first time, it measured not just what laws exist but how they work in practice. The findings confirmed deep and broad inequalities. Fewer than 5% of women worldwide live in economies providing full legal equality. In roughly 80% of countries where violence protection laws exist, enforcement is ineffective. Less than half of countries provide women equal access to finance. Only half the policies needed to implement laws already on the books are in place globally. No countries have fully achieved gender equality in legal frameworks under Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) measures.

As world leaders gather for the 70th UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW)   to consider how to bring rights and justice to all women and girls, action must include maximizing the historic opportunity of AI transformation to address current gaps.

Why does AI transformation represent a unique historic opportunity to address women’s legal inequality and why must it be seized now?

Three dynamics make this moment distinct. First, legal systems and institutions – already among the most conservative in any society – rarely change through incremental pressure. They change through disruption. AI delivers this a top speed. Second, AI transformation requires building new infrastructure, systems, and solutions. This institution-building is an opportunity to correct structural flaws embedded in current institutions; if it isn’t taken, we risk encoding them at scale. Third, deployed with intention, AI holds extraordinary potential to close structural and operational gaps.  It can enable novel solutions as well as unleash power to monitor implementation of law and support accountability at a scale. Understanding each of these dynamics is foundational to making the most of the present opportunity.

Two decades of leading legal system transformation –first, in Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, then in the Middle East and North Africa through the Arab Spring and beyond – have shown that societal disruption creates an environment uniquely favorable for driving change in legal systems and institutions. In the absence of such an environment, legal systems are often resistant to change in many parts of the world. The structures and practices of these institutions, girded in tradition, do not yield often to incremental pressure. But disruption does what incremental pressure cannot. It destabilizes power structures, changes incentives, and creates opportunities when broader societal momentum for change can influence the legal sector. In response to the Arab Spring, Morocco revised its constitution to guarantee gender parity, Libya overhauled the law regulating its legal profession, and Bahrain built an entirely new system of alternatives to incarceration — all within a window of disruption.

Whether or not you see AI transformation in revolutionary terms, it is a historic disruption event in law. The legal sector is rebuilding its workflows, roles, and solutions. It is asking how justice can be delivered more effectively and on what terms. And we are in a disruption window: the moment when what gets built, who builds it, and with what design criteria are genuinely open questions.

AI also creates the opportunity to build new infrastructure that can overcome the flaws embedded in current systems. Every new law, policy, institution, and solution built for the AI era is an opportunity to integrate equality by design. We cannot miss this uniquely potent opportunity to build a new future for women and law. The choice is simple: either we commit ourselves to designing and building new systems and solutions or we continue to struggle to patch broken systems never fully addressing their shortcomings. The results (noted above) in the report flow directly from the incremental/conventional approach. The transformational approach, however, aims high and maximizes the potential for comprehensive changes.

AI is also a powerful tool for closing gaps and building novel legal solutions to better address needs. AI can explain legal information in simple terms, reduce the cost and mechanisms for delivering legal services making them more accessible, and even map implementation gaps identifying patterns showing advocates not just where the law fails women, but how, at what rate, and for which populations. It can extend the reach of justice and access to law in previously unimaginable ways.

A transformation agenda built on four fundamental actions will ensure we make the most of this opportunity for legal equality.

A Transformation Agenda: Four Actions

Action 1: Understand the Context AI is Disrupting

Women’s ability to meet their legal needs is not simply a subset of the global access to justice gap. It is a structurally distinct problem: more acute, more compounding, and often brings consequences that cascade across other dimensions of a woman’s life. The UN finds that women face greater barriers to accessing justice than men in 70% of countries. World Justice Project research confirms this: women experience greater hardship from legal problems than men in 62% of countries surveyed. When left unresolved, women’s legal needs compound. They face economic precarity tied to domestic violence or divorce, housing instability, immigration vulnerability when legal status is tied to a partner, lost inheritance, barriers to workplace protections, and barriers to accessing capital needed to build businesses or engage in entrepreneurship.

Per the World Bank report and the UN’s Report of the Secretary General on Ensuring and Strengthening Access to Justice for All Women and Girls, women’s legal inequality operates across four simultaneous layers. The first is the gap in laws and regulation themselves. The second is the operational gap: laws that exist but are inconsistently implemented. The third is the solutions gap: because current pathways to justice weren’t built with women’s inputs or needs in mind, solutions for many of their most urgent legal needs are simply absent from current systems and markets. The fourth is the contextual barrier: where solutions do exist, their effectiveness is often shaped by patriarchal norms embedded in justice institutions, services, and even products, care responsibilities that determine who can access help and by what means, and power imbalances that determine whether legal processes produce safe outcomes

A protection order illustrates how three of the layers operate simultaneously. A law exists, but its enforcement may be inconsistent. Obtaining an order may require resources, literacy, or physical presence the woman seeking it cannot safely undertake. Even when obtained, the order’s

effectiveness depends on enforcement culture of the jurisdiction. The system has technically functioned but may still have failed the person it was meant to protect.

Action 2: Align AI Transformation with the Context

AI will either encode the legal status quo or unlock a historic opportunity to address its structural and operational shortcomings. The design choices being made now will carry that choice forward at scale.

Contextual intelligence — understanding not only the formal legal problem but the conditions under which solutions succeed or fail — must be incorporated into new infrastructure and solutions by design. A legal help platform that does not account for the user’s safety risk in seeking help may route a domestic violence survivor to a service that notifies her abuser.

Incorporating intelligence documented by the UN, World Bank, and others into design is pivotal to ensuring that AI narrows instead of widens current gaps.

Action 3: Adopt and Resource a Public Interest Orientation

Legal needs in areas that deeply affect women’s lives such as domestic violence, housing, employment, and family law require intentional public interest-oriented AI design and investment. Women leaders and public interest innovators are already at the forefront of applying AI to solve these high-demand, under-resourced needs through innovating in legal aid organizations or platforms offering support for divorce and gender-based violence.  Despite the importance of catalyzing public interest AI innovation to maximizing access to justice for women and girls, it has attracted modest support from the donors and markets as AI investment in the broader legal sector continues its stratospheric climb. Business facing legal AI attracted over $4 billion in 2025, per Crunchbase. Public interest legal technology has garnered only a fraction of this. While the markets for some point solutions may be complex and limited, strategies for leveraging larger public and private AI infrastructure building to advance solution are underexplored.

Action 4: Catalyze Inclusive Innovation

A disruption window that concentrates the opportunity to build in the same hands that built the legal status quo will re-encode the same gaps at AI scale. The question of who builds legal AI, with what knowledge, and for whom is a societal, systems, and design question and the data already reveals which direction the field is heading.

Lady Justice Initiative research, spanning 31 countries and 105 women leaders in legal technology innovation, including founders operating at the intersection of gender, law, and technology, found that infrastructure to support them is significantly underdeveloped relative to the urgency of the challenge. Over 44% of respondents faced significant challenges accessing capital for their innovations. Closing that gap requires mission-aligned capital and policy frameworks that recognize public interest legal AI as the upstream intervention it is.

Importantly, women practitioners carry specific knowledge of why solutions fail even when they technically exist because they have worked inside the systems and where that failure happens and/or experienced them personally.

This knowledge is also amplified by their own experiences navigating the sector as professionals. Once their contextual understanding is designed into infrastructure, it scales across every interaction, at cost and accessibility levels that can reach the majority of people currently outside meaningful legal access. Inclusive innovation is essential to contextual design needed to truly close the legal equality gap.

Disruptive moments in law are rare. AI is demanding new systems and institutions and carries genuine promise for closing the structural and operational gaps. That promise requires leaders who treat this moment as the historic opening it is. Rights. Justice. Action.

Angela