Our Story
Born out of frustration. Built on hope.
Women AI Labs began as a research project at Northwestern University, after our founding team discovered that a widely-deployed healthcare algorithm systematically underestimated the severity of symptoms in women of color by over 25%.
That finding sparked a coalition. We brought together engineers, policy advocates, community leaders, and impacted patients — and built a methodology for auditing AI systems that is now used by federal agencies and hospital networks across the country.
Today we operate Innovation Labs in 14 cities, run an annual AI Equity Challenge that has produced over 387 production prototypes, and support 112 scholars every year through our education programs.