The Double Bias Problem: What Every Woman Attorney Needs to Know About AI
I started researching AI visibility out of curiosity. What I found changed the direction of my entire career. AI visibility is something most attorneys have never been told they need to think about, and that gap is exactly the problem.
In plain terms, AI visibility is the ability to be found, recognized, and recommended by artificial intelligence platforms when someone asks them a question. When a potential client types "find me a family law attorney in Denver" into ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity, AI visibility determines whose name appears and whose doesn't. Not a Google search. Not a directory browse. A direct question to an AI system, answered with a name. Possibly yours. Possibly not.
I'm Joy Morales, founder of the Women's AI Visibility Institute, and after two years of research and data collection across hundreds of Colorado and Texas women attorneys, the numbers told a clear story: 69.4% of Colorado women attorneys fall below the AI visibility threshold. For most women attorneys, when a potential client asks AI to find them a lawyer, they simply don't appear.
This isn't bad luck. It's a double bias problem and it started long before your website was built.
The First Bias: History Wrote You Out
AI systems learn from existing data. For decades, legal publishing, case citations, bar directories, law review articles dramatically underrepresented women. AI didn't create that imbalance. It inherited it.
When an AI platform was trained, it absorbed a legal world where men were cited more, quoted more, and featured more. That foundation is baked in, and it quietly shapes every recommendation those platforms make today.
The Second Bias: It's Happening Right Now
Here's what stings more: the bias isn't just historical. It's live.
Every day, AI platforms scan the web and score what they find such as, schema markup, legal directory profiles, LinkedIn signals, website structure. These are the invisible infrastructure signals that tell AI this person is a credible attorney worth recommending. My research found that 94% of Colorado women attorneys are missing schema markup entirely, the single most important technical signal for AI visibility.
No one told you this was required. That's not a personal failure. It's a systemic gap that nobody in the legal profession has been talking about until now.
The Compounding Effect
These two biases don't just coexist. They compound.
Less AI visibility means fewer recommendations. Fewer recommendations mean less new data being generated about you. Less data means even lower visibility in the next AI training cycle. The attorneys who are already visible get more visible. The attorneys who are already invisible fall further behind.
Waiting is not a neutral choice. Every month this goes unaddressed, the gap widens.
You Deserve to Be Found
The good news? This is fixable. The signals AI looks for can be built. The gaps can be closed. And the more women attorneys who understand this problem, the more pressure we can put on AI systems to level the playing field.
In the posts ahead, I'll walk you through what the data actually shows, what you can do about it practically, and what we should be doing to work together as a profession.
It’s not what you are doing with AI…It’s what AI is doing to you!
Joy Morales is a researcher and educator with more than 20 years of experience turning complex data into meaningful change. Holding an M.A. in Educational Research, she founded the Women's AI Visibility Institute to shine a light on one of the most overlooked issues facing women attorneys today. As Founder and CEO, she leads the only empirical, state-by-state study of AI visibility disparities for women attorneys in the United States, with research spanning Colorado and Texas and a national study underway. Her work sits at the intersection of data, advocacy, and practical solutions for women in the legal profession.
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