Advancing gender equity and inclusive digital futures through responsible agentic artificial intelligence governance

The shift to agentic AI represents a major paradigm change in the field of intelligent systems research and development, as these systems are capable of establishing sub-goals, planning for a goal, and executing plans with only minimal human oversight. This capability offers a unique chance to promote gender equality, inclusive digital engagement, and sustainable growth via evolving, accessible and fair AI-based methods throughout industries. Meanwhile, the increased autonomy of agentic AI systems presents unique challenges such as the potential for algorithmic bias to be amplified, decision-making disparities, and a lack of governance, each of which requires responsible AI, transparent governance, and clear ethical frameworks. This paper presents a systematic literature review and bibliometric analysis of a 41 paper corpus from Scopus. The review follows PRISMA 2020 guidelines and summarizes the evidence regarding agentic and generative AI architectures, typologies of bias, and sectoral applications in healthcare, education, and gender equity. The paper presents a human-centred conceptual framework for responsible governance of agentic AI, building on lifecycle-governance and equity-by-design approaches, which merges bias mitigation, gender-inclusive design, and sustainability transition. The network of co-authorship is highly fragmented (density = 0.021; number of components = 37 from 88 authors), suggesting that there is no coordinated research agenda and giving empirical support to the integrative framework proposed here. This fragmentation further indicates that the vision and capabilities of agentic AI to contribute to gender equality and education are still not fully explored in the context of governance and sustainability, highlighting the relevance of the framework introduced in this paper. This is a collection of AI topics, derived from the title, that are examined from a gender equality perspective.This is a list of AI keywords that have been explored through the lens of gender equity, based on the title.