Mara Bolis is a practitioner and public voice on the gender dynamics of AI adoption, bringing 20 years of experience leading women's economic empowerment programs across Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the United States.
She is the founder of First Prompt, an equitable AI adoption lab, and a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Bolis's work sits at the intersection of gender equality and emerging technology. Her framework, "Fierce Ambivalence," published in Stanford Social Innovation Review, argues that women's hesitation toward generative AI reflects risk awareness — not risk aversion — and calls for community-based, peer-driven approaches to help women engage AI on their own terms. The framework directly inspired an OECD expert focus group examining how women's attitudes toward AI are perceived and should be perceived, research supported by the German Ministry of Labour.
At Berkman Klein, Bolis will investigate how generative AI is reshaping women's lives and how they can claim their agency in response by conducting listening sessions, testing peer-driven learning approaches, and translating her findings into public scholarship and policy recommendations. Prior to founding First Prompt, Bolis served as a Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, Chief Strategy Officer at Moms First (formerly Marshall Plan for Moms), Senior Advisor at Value for Women, and Associate Director of Women's Economic Rights at Oxfam America, where she represented the organization at the OECD, Skoll World Forum, and Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs.
Earlier in her career she held positions at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation and the World Bank. Bolis has been published in Stanford Social Innovation Review, Gender & Development, and the International Journal of Gender and Entrepreneurship, and has been interviewed by Bloomberg News, CNN, the Washington Post, Reuters, and Forbes, among others. She is a sought-after speaker on gender and AI, having delivered keynote addresses at Riga Tech Girls, AwakenHub in Dublin and the American Council on Education Women's Network, and is co-host of the Womansplaining AI podcast. She holds an MBA from Johns Hopkins University and an MS in Foreign Service from Georgetown University.
