By Sylvia Koruthu, Sustainability Division, MCMC
For over two decades, the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) has been entrusted with advancing the nation’s digital landscape. Its mission began with a simple but powerful goal: to connect Malaysians.
Today, that mission has delivered remarkable progress. Internet and communication coverage now reaches 98.82% of populated areas. The mobile 5G broadband penetration rate has climbed to 82.7% per 100 inhabitants. By early 2025, speed test data showed median mobile download speeds exceeding 100 Mbps, with overall mobile broadband speeds reaching 150.10 Mbps. These milestones are rightly a source of national pride, reflecting MCMC’s success in building world-class access to communications and multimedia services.
But the real story goes beyond towers, cables and orbits. The next challenge is not just about connecting people, but ensuring that those connections are empowered. And here, the stakes are highest for women. Connectivity without trust risks becoming another divide rather than a bridge. The question is not only whether Malaysians are online, but whether women can be online safely, confidently and equally.
Globally, the numbers are sobering. Women are about 15% less likely than men to use mobile internet in low- and middle-income countries, leaving roughly 265 million fewer women online (GSMA, 2024). Meanwhile, widely cited analyses drawing on LinkedIn data have long estimated that women comprise only about 22% of Artificial intelligence (AI) professionals globally, underscoring how systems shaping digital life are often designed without women’s perspectives (World Economic Forum/LinkedIn, 2018). The underrepresentation of women in STEM and AI underscores how the systems shaping digital life are often designed on incomplete or biased data, and this risk replicating stereotypes into these systems instead of dismantling them.
The threats are not hypothetical. They are lived realities for millions of women. The below are just some examples to share:
- Cyberbullying and harassment: In Southeast Asia, women activists, journalists, and students have reported relentless waves of online abuse. Cases like Malaysian student activist Ain Husniza, who was harassed for speaking out against sexism, highlight how unsafe digital spaces can silence women’s voices.
- Deepfake sexual abuse: The problem is accelerating. In March, the European Parliament cited a statistic showing that 96–98% of all deepfakes online are pornographic and 99% of them target women and girls. With generative AI tools now mainstream, woman face increased risk of being a potential victim.
- Exclusion from shaping AI: Because women are under-represented in technical teams, their perspectives are missing in product design. Biased data and one-sided assumptions can become “baked into” AI systems that moderate speech, rank content, or allocate opportunities.
This is the trust gap we must address: ensuring that AI is designed for and with women, so that the digital future is inclusive, safe and empowering.
The AI Paradox
AI embodies a paradox: it can be the great equaliser – or the sharpest divider. On one side, AI empowers. In Penang, women-led microbusinesses using AI-driven e-commerce platforms have cut administrative time by half, allowing them to expand from local night markets into global markets. In health, AI-assisted cervical cancer screening and smartphone-based tools are being piloted in low- and middle-income seƫngs, improving triage and early detection pathways (Ahmed et al., 2024; Tun et al., 2025). For women who have historically been left out of economic participation, AI holds the promise of leapfrogging old barriers.
On the other side, AI mirrors human bias. In 2018, Amazon scrapped an experimental hiring algorithm after it systematically downgraded résumés that included the word “women,” such as “women’s chess club captain.” The algorithm wasn’t malicious; it was trained on a decade of male-dominated recruitment data. Search engines still default to male engineers and female nurses. Facial recognition systems are less accurate at identifying women and people of colour. These are not glitches. They are the natural outcome of who sits at the table when AI is built – and who does not. With only 22% of the global AI workforce female, too many systems are being coded without women’s perspectives and that absence is evident across the systems we use today.
Malaysia’s Next Chapter
Recognising both the risks and the opportunities, Malaysia has begun placing trust and inclusion at the heart of its national agenda. Several initiatives stand out amongst which include:
- 13th Malaysia Plan (2026–2030): Aims to raise female labour force participation to 60% by 2030, expand reskilling in AI and digital technologies and embed inclusion and trust in national development strategy.
- NADI Centres: A network of more than 1,099 community digital hubs across the country. By March 2025, over 4,000 entrepreneurs had been trained there, including 3,390 women under the NADI EmpowHER programme. This grassroots effort won global recognition at WSIS 2025, proving that digital trust is built not just in Silicon Valley boardrooms, but in Malaysian villages.
- AI Untuk Rakyat (AI For Citizens): Free, multilingual AI literacy modules in Malay, English, Mandarin and Tamil. Launched in January 2024, it has reached 1 million Malaysians in under six months. Adjacent programmes aim to train 800,000 more in AI by 2025.
- Code of Conduct (Best Practice) for Internet Messaging and Social Media Providers: Effective January 2025, requiring platforms to strengthen safeguards for children and vulnerable users.
Beyond programmes, stories of leadership show what inclusion looks like in practice. In Penang, Goh Ai Ching co-founded Piktochart and transformed it into a global storytelling plaƞorm, built on empathy and usability. At FemForward 2025, women innovators from logistics to AI showcased what happens when women move from the margins to the centre of innovation. At the Girls in ICT Forum, schoolgirls sat across the table from CEOs and regulators, opening mentorship pipelines into data science, AI and cybersecurity. These are not side notes in Malaysia’s digital transformation story. They are real stories.
The true pulse of the digital economy cannot be measured by just connectivity alone. Connectivity is only the beginning. Inclusion is the next frontier. The real measure of progress is trust, the confidence that our digital spaces are safe, fair and empowering. That is why creating digital trust and empowering women with inclusive AI is not simply a technological task. It is a societal imperative and a moral call to action.
If we succeed, AI will not only mirror the world as it stands today. It will help us build the world as it ought to be.
References
Ahmed, A. et al. (2024) ‘A cost-effective AI pipeline for cervical cancer screening in low-resource settings’, NPJ Digital Medicine. Available at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-024-01072-5
Alan Turing Institute (2024) Behind the deepfake: 8% create; 90% concerned. London: The Alan Turing Institute. Available at: https://www.turing.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2024-07/behind_the_deepfake_full_publication.pdf
Bernama (2025) ‘More than 1,099 Nadi centres, 3,390 women trained under Nadi EmpowHER’, Bernama.
GSMA (2024) Mobile Gender Gap Report 2024. London: GSMA. Available at: https://www.gsma.com/r/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/GSMA-Mobile-Gender-Gap-Report-2024.pdf
World Economic Forum & LinkedIn (2018) ‘Global Gender Gap—LinkedIn Global Gender Gap Insights’, in Global Gender Gap Report 2018 at: https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GGGR_2018.pdf