Issue:
January 2026 | Ask an Associate
Patricia Bader-Johnston is harnessing women’s voices to bring much-needed balance to Artificial Intelligence
Backed by a wealth of knowledge and experience accumulated over decades, Patricia Bader-Johnston is the force behind Kokoro for Women`s Wisdom – an initiative to tackle gender imbalance in Artificial Intelligence [AI].
As AI seeps into practically every aspect of our lives, Bader-Johnston said the project’s launch last year would lead to the development of web-based applications to increase the volume of content coded by women sourced from Large Language Models - powerful AI systems that can understand, generate, and process human language for tasks such as answering questions, summarizing, translating, and writing.
“The training of AI is a primarily masculine domain embodying historical biases, positive and negative as viewed through the lens of male perspective given their predominance in developing content,” Bader-Johnston said in an interview with the Number 1 Shimbun.
To counterbalance global gender disparity, the Kokoro platform seeks to encode women’s wisdom, drawing on their individual goals and strengths, along with mentoring and peer learning.
Ultimately, Bader-Johnston wants AI-generated knowledge to engage and equip one million women across the world within five years, via a pool of data that reflects female perspectives. “Access to women`s wisdom is simply not available automatically in ChatGPT, for instance, because it has been primarily trained by men,” she said.
The project is managed by Big Heart Technologies Inc, where Bader-Johnston is the founder and corporate operating officer. She works with two other experts who are leading figures in technology and business ethics.
Her goal is to raise female participation in finding solutions to issues facing humanity. Kokoro, for example, will be able to provide gender-balanced information on the internet for a teenager struggling with body image.
“The trend today is for kids to talk to ChatGPT when they have a problem and not ask their mothers or relatives as was the norm,” she said, pointing out that a young girl seeking advice currently has no idea that she is hearing the voice of a male marketer or influencer.
“Our Kokoro platform will multiply the voices raising the profile of the wisdom of the accomplished mothers, sisters and aunts into the AI ecosystem that is advising younger generations of all genders.”
Her career has been defined by cultural and professional diversity. The Canadian, who has been based in Tokyo for 40 years, first taught English in rural Japan, before moving into diplomacy and government, and later taking up leadership roles in business. As an entrepreneur, she has founded more than 20 companies.
The mother of four children said her eclectic experiences had helped her gain the insights and sensitivity that are essential for success. In 2008 she founded a sustainability-focused consulting company called Silverbirch Associates with clients from government and corporations. More recently, she founded Earthberries Capital, which supports community ownership of energy transition and other project.
Her strength is Japan, a country that first captured her attention when she was growing up in western Canada. The Kokoro project, a nod to the Japanese emphasis on collaboration, is working with Japanese female researchers who will contribute to the encoding of female perspectives in AI.
“There will be no male filter applied in the content gathering process and this type of research and data is currently not available on ChatGPT,” she said. The platform is also collecting content from female counterparts in Uganda, Brazil, India, and other countries.
Bader-Johnston is also collecting information about women who have played a prominent role in Japan’s ancient crafts, where the spotlight has traditionally been on men.
“Women do view the world with slightly different perspectives compared to men,” she said. Kokoro data, she said, “will provide important answers to questions such as discovering the purpose that women bring into their training of AI models. Are parents more interested in pursuing AI models that, say, control issues such as cyberbullying and depression in children, or in those that advance military interests?”
Describing the Kokoro venture as an “ethical breakthrough”, AI, Bader-Johnston aims to flood the web with female wisdom and give those who make up more than half the world’s population a proper voice in this latest revolution in technology.
Suvendrini Kakuchi is Tokyo correspondent for University World News in the UK.
