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When AI Erased Chanel’s Women Leaders
When Chanel’s CEO Leena Nair visited Microsoft headquarters, she asked ChatGPT to create an image of “Chanel’s leadership team visiting Microsoft.” What came back was shocking…but not surprising.
All men. All in suits.
This, for a company whose workforce is 76% women, whose customers are 96% women, and whose CEO herself is one of only two women ever to lead the brand in its 114-year history.
The algorithm didn’t just get it wrong. It revealed a truth we still avoid: AI reflects the world we’ve built, not the one we’re striving for.
AI doesn’t invent bias. It learns it.
From the images, stories and patterns we’ve collectively uploaded into the digital world…where leadership still looks overwhelmingly male, corporate power still defaults to masculine, and the stories of women in charge are still underrepresented.
What Leena Nair experienced is something women have known for decades: invisibility doesn’t mean absence.
It means the world hasn’t learned to see you yet.
And if we’re not intentional, AI becomes the most powerful amplifier of that blindness.
Visibility isn’t vanity…it’s equity.
This isn’t about a picture. It’s about the power of presence.
When the visual narrative of leadership excludes women, especially in spaces of innovation and influence, we lose more than representation. We lose what future generations will believe is possible.
As I often remind the women I coach… “If you don’t show up, you’re not just missing from the room, you’re missing from the record.”
That’s why the “O” in my B.O.L.D. framework-Own Your Presence, isn’t just about self-promotion. It’s about making sure your voice, your perspective and your leadership are visible in the rooms, systems, and yes, even algorithms, that define success.
Three Ways to Reclaim Women’s Leadership Visibility
So, what do we do?
- Be Visible On Purpose-Step forward in panels, press and digital spaces. Every visible example of female leadership adds a data point to the narrative AI learns from.
- Call Out What You See-When bias shows up in images, reports or hiring systems, say something. Visibility changes nothing if silence follows it.
- Lead The Conversation, Not The Reaction-Women in leadership have a critical role in shaping how organizations adopt AI…with ethics, equity and human presence at the core.
When AI erases women from the picture, it’s not just a glitch. It’s a warning. Technology is only as inclusive as the people guiding it.
We can’t let the future be written in our absence.
So the next time you step into the room, show up as yourself, own your space and remember:
Your presence today becomes someone else’s possibility tomorrow.