Aisha’s Story: Career Guidance That Limits Instead of Lifts

Aisha is a high schooler with a love for math and a dream of solving real-world problems. But when she used her school’s new AI-based career guidance app, the suggestions were underwhelming: teacher, admin assistant, retail supervisor.

Where was data science? Engineering? Entrepreneurship?
Nowhere.

The app was trained on regional job trend data and historic employment outcomes. In that data, there weren’t many Black or Latina women in STEM—so the algorithm didn’t suggest it to Aisha. It didn’t ask if that pattern was fair. It simply repeated it.

Bias Insight:

• AI systems trained on yesterday’s realities can erase tomorrow’s possibilities.

• Aisha’s potential was invisible in the eyes of a model trained to conform.

For young people, especially those from underrepresented backgrounds, this matters. These subtle exclusions shape dreams—or cut them off before they can even form.