The New Age of Sexism: How AI and Emerging Technologies Are Reinventing Misogyny — Review

Review

Technology does not emerge in a vacuum. It grows out of human values, human biases, and human histories—and, as Laura Bates argues in The New Age of Sexism, those histories are riddled with misogyny. Bates has long been one of the clearest, most unflinching voices examining how gendered power operates in everyday life. Here, she widens her lens to interrogate not only individuals and institutions but the infrastructures and algorithms shaping the next era of public life.

This is not simply a book about harassment or digital toxicity. It is an investigation into the systemic, structural, and frequently invisible ways that AI and emerging technologies collect, reproduce, and amplify gender bias. As someone who reads widely in the tech-ethics space, I found Bates’s work both validating and deeply unsettling—she gathers scattered research threads, firsthand accounts, industry patterns, and nascent technological trends into a cohesive narrative that is urgent without being alarmist.

A Rigorous Look at How Bias Scales

One of Bates’s strengths is her ability to explain complex systems without oversimplification. Machine learning isn’t framed as a mysterious black box; nor does she reduce algorithmic bias to a neat checklist. Instead, she shows how datasets are shaped by the cultural assumptions of their creators, how platform incentives reward extremity, and how automation can harden prejudice into infrastructure. Her examples range from the banal to the terrifying: from subtle search-engine stereotyping to AI-generated deepfake abuse that targets women in the public eye—and increasingly, ordinary women and girls.

Throughout, Bates maintains a careful balance between data-driven analysis and human-centered storytelling. You feel the emotional toll on the individuals affected, but you’re also guided through the political and technical conditions that allow those harms to flourish.

Not Just a Catalogue of Problems

What impressed me most is that Bates resists fatalism. She does not surrender to the idea that “technology will do what technology does.” Instead, she consistently situates responsibility with people: developers, policymakers, corporate leaders, educators, and cultural shapers. She traces how technological misogyny is not an inevitable outcome of innovation but the predictable result of unexamined assumptions and unregulated systems.

Her chapters on regulatory gaps are particularly strong. Without slipping into jargon or legislative minutiae, she explains why existing frameworks are inadequate for digital harms that operate at scale and speed. Bates is not arguing for blanket bans or a puritanical internet—she is arguing for thoughtful governance built around transparency, accountability, and harm prevention.

Where Bates Shines Most: Connecting the Dots

Readers familiar with Bates’s earlier work will recognize her signature clarity, especially when mapping the throughlines between offline misogyny and online expressions. She convincingly demonstrates that technological misogyny is not a “new” phenomenon but an evolution of old patterns given new tools. What changes is magnitude: a single piece of machine learning can replicate thousands of biased decisions per second; a platform can spread misogynistic narratives across continents within hours.

This is the book’s most sobering argument—these systems don’t just reflect prejudice; they accelerate it. They optimize it. And in doing so, they shift cultural baselines of what is normal, acceptable, or ignorable.

Who Should Read This

If you work in tech, policy, education, law, media, or simply exist online, this book is essential. Bates reframes issues that many readers may believe they “already understand.” Even those well-versed in the AI ethics conversation will find new intersections and case studies.

For general readers who worry this may be too technical: the prose is accessible, and Bates is skilled at translating complexity without condescension. The book’s pacing is strong, its structure intuitive, and its arguments cumulative rather than repetitive.

A Few Stylistic Notes

Bates writes with precision and moral clarity. Occasionally, the density of examples in certain chapters may feel overwhelming, but that sense of overwhelm mirrors the scope of the problem she is diagnosing. She refuses to sanitize harm—and that refusal is part of the book’s power.

Her approach is less polemic and more forensic. She is not lecturing, but unveiling.

Final Thoughts

The New Age of Sexism is essential reading for understanding one of the defining issues of our technological era. By the final chapter, Bates has made a compelling case that misogyny is not just an unfortunate byproduct of digital culture—it is coded into the design of many systems unless we intervene deliberately.

The book doesn’t just describe a problem; it calls for collective responsibility. And in a landscape where technological optimism often obscures human impact, that call feels both courageous and necessary.

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