On Sunday, March 8, nearly 40 women gathered in Boulder for Women in AI’s local SheBuilds event, part of Lovable’s global International Women’s Day initiative. Backed by Lovable, Anthropic, and Stripe, the afternoon created something many women rarely get enough of: protected time to learn, experiment, and build.
Over the course of a three-hour workshop, women with a wide range of backgrounds, including several who had never coded before, used AI-powered tools to create projects tied to real needs in their lives. They built tools to compare resumes against job descriptions, help balance invisible labor at home, map daily priorities to calendars, and spark ideas for business websites. What filled the room was not just curiosity, but relief, pride, and a growing sense that building technology is not reserved for a small technical few.
That mattered because many of the conversations in the room were not really about software. They were about time. Several women spoke openly about the strain of juggling careers, caregiving, children, aging parents, and the long list of unseen work that still falls disproportionately to women at home. In a moment when so much of the AI shift depends on people finding extra hours to upskill, that reality cannot be ignored.
For many women, especially those in the "sandwich generation," making time to learn something new is not a matter of motivation. It is a matter of capacity. Events like this do not solve that structural problem, but they do create an entry point and a sense of possibility. By the end of the session, every participant had made something she was proud of and left with proof that building is not reserved for engineers.
That is part of why International Women’s Day still matters, even in places where it is not widely marked. The 2026 campaign theme, “Give to Gain,” argues that progress for women grows when time, knowledge, access, and support are shared. In Boulder, that idea took on a practical shape as facilitators Crys Black, Julie Young, and Cynthia Coulbourne helped turn curiosity into action.
Participants were not only introduced to new tools. They were given permission to see themselves differently, as builders with a place in shaping the AI future. As Crys Black told the room at the end of the day, The hope is that this would not be the only day they build.
That feels like the real takeaway from Boulder: not just that women can learn these tools, but that when they are given the space to do it, they build things that are practical, thoughtful, and grounded in real life. The real opportunity is what happens next, when more women keep going, keep learning, and keep making tools that reflect the realities of their own lives.
Disclosure: The writer served as a facilitator for this event and is a strategic advisory board member for Women in AI.
