Book Extract: Excerpted with permission from the publisher The New Age of Sexism, Laura Bates, published by Simon and Schuster India

Book Extract: Excerpted with permission from the publisher The New Age of Sexism, Laura Bates, published by Simon and Schuster India.

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Despite the advances that have been made in gender equality, the world that women live in is still very different from the one men inhabit. Men and women can walk down exactly the same street and have vastly different experiences. The same is true of the online world. This is a truth that almost every expert I interviewed for the book touched on in some way: women simply have a different experience of technology than men do.

This is unsurprising when you consider that, globally, 38 per cent of women have had personal experiences of online violence, while 85 per cent of women who spend time online have witnessed digital violence against other women. Data from different regions points to a universal problem. A UN Women study in the Arab States region found that 60 per cent of female internet users had been exposed to online violence. A study of ve countries in sub-Saharan Africa found that 28 per cent of women had experienced the same. A 2017 survey of women aged 1855 in Denmark, Italy, New Zealand, Poland, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the USA found that 23 per cent of women reported at least one experience of online abuse or harassment. Research suggests that women are twenty-seven times more likely than men to be harassed online and that Black women are 84 per cent more likely to receive abuse than white women.

If women and marginalised communities have already learned, from their

frequent mistreatment on social media, to self-censor, to withdraw, to mask, to disguise their real names and to mute their voices, all these coping mechanisms and restrictive norms will follow them when they step into new technological environments. Their experience will be interfaced by an entirely different perception of virtual worlds than the one many men have. And their contributions to those worlds will be limited and suppressed by the survival mechanisms already apparent in women’s online behaviour. Nearly nine in ten women say they restrict their online activity in some way as a result of online violence, with one in three saying they think twice before posting any content online and half saying the internet is not a safe place to share thoughts.

This is already apparent in our use and uptake of new technologies. For example, 71 per cent of men aged 184 utilise artificial intelligence (AI) weekly, while only 59 per cent of women within the corresponding age range do the same.

Although there is no single definition, AI is the product of training

computers to learn and to solve problems, often using huge amounts of data. In the past few years, the global conversation about AI has exploded as we’ve seen a wave of new, widely available tools bringing the concept into the spotlight, sparking a frenzy of investment and, with it, media attention.

The rate of global investment in AI is skyrocketing, as companies and countries invest in what has been described as a new arms race. The Californian company Nvidia, which dominates the market in the chips needed for AI, saw its share price almost double between January and June 2024, making it the most valuable company in the world, with a value of 3.34 trillion (2.63 trillion). The trend has been dubbed an AI frenzy, with the components described by analysts as the new gold or oil. In fact, a brief glance at the top ten most valuable companies in the world gives a pretty clear idea of the value and importance of AI: alongside Nvidia are the likes of Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet (Google’s parent company) and Meta.

In 2025, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced plans to unleash AI’ across the UK, which he said would drive incredible change’ and transform the lives of working people. And in one of the first executive orders of his second presidency, Donald Trump pledged to enhance America’s global AI dominance, with the announcement of a new 500 billion private sector AI infrastructure project.11 With all this hype, it’s not surprising that headlines have been flooded with breathless predictions of AI explosions and imminent world domination.

Could Articial Intelligence Destroy Humanity?

AI Poses Risk of Extinction

Will AI Take Over the World?

Could AI Carry Out Coups Next Unless Stopped Now?

These are all questions posed by leading news outlets, from the New York Times

to Al Jazeera and NPR.

It is ironic that, amid the public panic about human extermination by AI, we tend to lose sight of the more imminent risks posed by this emerging technology. While there are many brilliant writers and thinkers dealing with the potential existential implications of AI, my focus in this book is on the less discussed ways in which its misuse causes immediate harm to women and marginalised communities in the here and now, not decades in the future.

The widespread conversation we are currently having about AI has largely been driven by the explosive arrival of ChatGPT, Gemini, Llama and similar large language models (LLMs). Globally 21.3 billion was invested in generative AI in 2023 alone, according to EY.

LLMs use vast datasets, such as text from the internet, to learn about linguistic patterns, enabling them to generate realistic human-sounding language and engage convincingly in conversations with their users. Tweaks and ne-tuning are then made by their creators to adapt them to the particular jobs they are designed to carry out.

Unlike the kinds of models we have seen before, where a set of keywords in a user’s question (such as refund’, sort code’ or contact’) might prompt a chatbot to spit out pre-written answers associated with those words. These LLMs generate unique, unstructured responses in a way that makes sense and, to people who are new to such technology, sounds eerily sentient. And they aren’t just confined to written language: LLMs can also generate computer code and visual language. Just as the models mimic and replicate the patterns they identify within text, they can also produce original’ AI images and videos by recognising patterns in the vast sets of images they’re trained on.

But LLMs aren’t really thinking’ for themselves. While they might seem to

be going o script’, they will usually regurgitate some version of the data they have consumed, or mimic something very similar (if the AI doesn’t know information, it can hallucinate’ something that sounds right). If they are fed false information, they can give misleading and inaccurate answers, yet make

them sound entirely plausible and factual. But unlike humans, they’re not able to make leaps to revolutionary new ways of thinking.

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Laura Bates, The New Age of Sexism, Simon and Schuster India, 2025. Pb. Pp. 320

‘Laura Bates explains how they built the future – and forgot to put women in it’ CAITLIN MORAN

'Fascinating and essential... I urge you to read every syllable' JO BRAND

‘All men must read this book if they have any interest in a truly just, fair and equal society’ ROBIN INCE

AI is here, bringing a seismic shift in the way our society operates. Might this mean a future reimagined on equitable terms for women and marginalised groups everywhere?

Not unless we fight for it. At present, power remains largely in the hands of a few rich, white men. New AI-driven technologies, with misogyny baked into their design, are putting women in danger, their rights and safety sacrificed at the altar of profitability and reckless speed.

In The New Age of Sexism, Sunday Times bestselling author and campaigner Laura Bates takes us deep into the heart of this rapidly evolving world. She explores the metaverse, confronts deepfake pornography, travels to cyber brothels, tests chatbots, and hears from schools in the grip of online sexual abuse, showing how our lives – from education to work, sex to entertainment – are being infiltrated by easily accessible technologies that are changing the way we live and love. What she finds is a wild west where existing forms of discrimination, inequality and harassment are being coded into the future we will all have little choice about living in – unless we seize this moment to demand change.

Gripping, courageous and eye-opening, The New Age of Sexism exposes a phenomenon we can’t afford to ignore any longer. Our future is on the line. We need to act now, before it is too late. ‘Urgent reading for anyone who is interested in the intersection of tech and gender equality, and indeed anyone who wants to be a part of building a better future, free from misogyny’ EMMA-LOUISE BOYNTON

‘A brilliantly researched, incredibly illuminating and frequently chilling account of the next chapter in tech's ongoing assault on our core values. A chapter that is already unfolding around us all’ JAMES O’BRIEN

Laura Bates studied English at Cambridge University and went on to be a freelance journalist. She has written for The Guardian, The Independent, The New Statesman, Red Magazine and Grazia among others. She is also contributor at Women Under Siege, a New-York based organisation working to combat the use of sexual violence as a tool of war in conflict zones worldwide. She is the founder of the Everyday Sexism Project.