{"id":6324,"date":"2026-06-30T05:12:54","date_gmt":"2026-06-29T22:12:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/daiilynews.cu.ma\/?p=6324"},"modified":"2026-06-30T05:12:54","modified_gmt":"2026-06-29T22:12:54","slug":"theres-a-reason-women-arent-swooning-over-ai-like-men-are","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/daiilynews.cu.ma\/?p=6324","title":{"rendered":"There’s a Reason Women Aren’t Swooning Over AI Like Men Are"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Image licensed from ShutterstockThe No\u00f6sphere is an entirely reader-supported publication that applies recent social science research to the cultural, political, and technological issues shaping our world today. If you read it every week and value the labour that goes into it, consider supporting it by liking or sharing this essay, buying me a coffee, or becoming a paid subscriber. New paid subscriptions, including gift subscriptions, taken out before the end of December, come with a 25% discount for the following year. You can redeem this discount by clicking here. Thank you for your support!The gender gap in AI usage has been making headlines lately.Women, it turns out, are more likely than men to avoid the various AI tools increasingly populating (or polluting) our world.According to a recent Harvard Business School meta-analysis of 18 studies, women have 22% lower odds of using generative AI websites and apps than men, both at work and in everyday life. And this pattern holds across countries, sectors, occupations, and tools. Between 2022 and 2024, women accounted for roughly 42% of global users of ChatGPT and Perplexity websites, and just 31% of Anthropic\u2019s. On smartphones, the gap widens even further: only 27% of ChatGPT app downloads come from women.The oft-proposed explanation is that women understand this new technology less, largely because they work in roles with lower exposure to it. Women are, after all, still outnumbered in STEM degrees and careers, including in AI-specific roles. The same is true in AI leadership\u200a\u2014\u200awomen hold fewer than 14% of senior executive positions in the industry. But Harvard\u2019s study also found that the usage gap remains even when women are explicitly given opportunities to learn and use AI tools.The gap\u2019s root causes just aren\u2019t as simple as women being \u2018less into technology\u2019 or lacking exposure or training.But they shouldn\u2019t be that hard to identify, either.For me, and, I imagine, for quite a few other women, the very first time I encountered any mention of AI (beyond science-fiction media) was through stories about non-consensual, sexually explicit AI-generated images and videos, dubbed \u2018deepfakes.\u2019 That was circa 2018 or 2019, by which point they\u2019d already been around for a year or two.And, to the surprise of absolutely no woman with even just an ounce of awareness of the world we live in, these AI deepfakes overwhelmingly targeted women and girls.By the end of 2020, more than 85,000 deepfake videos were circulating online\u200a\u2014\u200a95% of them sexual in nature, and 90% featuring women. By late 2022, there were thousands of easily accessible deepfake-creation tools, downloaded by millions of people worldwide. Today, even some social media platforms\u200a\u2014\u200alike Elon Musk\u2019s zombie Twitter, also known as X\u200a\u2014\u200acan be used to produce non-consensual intimate imagery of female celebrities and influencers. Politicians, lawmakers, journalists and other women in the public eye are routine targets too; in the US, roughly 1 in 6 congresswomen had already been victimised.But it\u2019s not only public figures either. Various AI tools are also weaponised against ordinary women and children. Some are explicitly built to \u2018undress\u2019 women, or, as their creators shamelessly advertise, to \u2018nudify\u2019 them. Others are used to identify vulnerable or \u2018controversial\u2019 content in women\u2019s social media posts\u200a\u2014\u200asuch as speaking about sexual harassment or calling out misogyny\u200a\u2014\u200aand then to automate harassment campaigns.And if AI industry\u2019s misogynistic offerings weren\u2019t enough, there\u2019s also the issue of gender bias baked right in, courtesy of the biased, unfiltered, and often unethical datasets these models are trained on.AI tools used in recruitment, for example, are more likely to recommend men over women, especially for higher-paying jobs, and even when qualifications are identical. Meanwhile, AI chatbots like ChatGPT have been found to advise women to ask for significantly lower salaries than men with the same CVs. In healthcare and public care sectors, AI systems tend to downplay women\u2019s needs and are more likely to miss illnesses in women than in men. Even in criminal justice, tools like the American COMPAS have shown bias against women, overpredicting their risk of reoffending. Racial bias frequently creeps into these same tools as well.Publicly available generative AI tools are\u200a\u2014\u200asurprise, surprise\u200a\u2014\u200ano better. When asked to depict a secretary or a nurse, they usually generate women, but when asked to depict a manager, doctor, or professor, they usually generate men. Women are also routinely portrayed as much younger than men across occupations and social roles. In some cases, AI\u2019s output doesn\u2019t even accurately reflect real-world disparities\u200a\u2014\u200ait amplifies them.All of this can, in turn, reinforce the discriminatory patterns already present in our society, leading to more inequality, not less.As Laura Bates, writer and founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, puts it :This is affecting women and other marginalised groups in very real ways, from whether you will be accepted for a bank loan, to being put forward for a job or even getting the right diagnosis for a serious health problem. And unless we demand accountability now, there is a risk that AI will drag us backwards, as today\u2019s inequality will be written into the building blocks of a future world.Tech companies love to promise a Glittering New World in which AI improves just about every aspect of our lives, but women are practically forced to see the cracks running straight through that techno-optimist fantasy. And we\u2019re not in the habit of ignoring them once we do.Women are often branded as the \u2018overly cautious\u2019 gender, especially in business or investing. But apart from the fact that research consistently finds women outperform men in investing\u200a\u2014\u200aso whatever we\u2019re doing, or not doing, is hardly \u2018too\u2019 cautious but actually just right\u200a\u2014\u200ait also shows women aren\u2019t necessarily more risk-averse at all. What is true, though, is that women tend to make decisions differently.In investing, for example, women are more long-term oriented, less impulsive, and more focused on steady growth. They\u2019re also more likely to align their choices with their values, prioritising sustainability and the common good. And we see this in other domains, too, including in workplaces and politics.When it comes to AI, women\u2019s approach seems no different. Women report more negative attitudes toward AI than men do, mostly because they anticipate that its harms might eclipse the benefits. Concerns about transparency, safety, data privacy, fairness, inclusivity, sustainability, and collective well-being all weigh more heavily on women\u2019s minds, including those working in tech. Unsurprisingly, it was two Black women, Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru, who first sounded the alarm about racial and gender bias in AI facial analysis software.Among adolescents, this gap exists as well. In one recent survey, 71% of teenage girls expressed concerns about AI reinforcing gender bias, and 70% linked AI recommendation algorithms to poor mental health. Most boys, by contrast, believed AI would help create more jobs and were far less concerned about its societal impact. Their interests also diverged: girls were drawn to ethics and policy; boys toward AI development and robotics.Still, we know that women\u2019s anxieties about AI are well-founded. (As the first part of this piece should make depressingly clear.) And even when women do use AI, they may end up paying a higher penalty for it than men.A recent study by Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Peking University asked more than 1,000 software engineers at a global tech company to evaluate the same Python code snippet and rate both its quality and the author\u2019s competence. The only variables were the author\u2019s supposed gender (male or female) and whether they used AI assistance. As expected, engineers using AI were judged as less competent overall. But this competence penalty hit women twice as hard\u200a\u2014\u200afemale engineers received a 13% drop in perceived competence for identical work, compared with 6% for male engineers. As the researchers commented:The AI assistance is framed as a \u2018proof\u2019 of their (women\u2019s) inadequacy rather than evidence of their strategic tool use.In a follow-up study, they found that women at the same company are very much aware of this gender-biased competence penalty, which, in turn, contributes to their lower use of AI.This is, yet again, hardly shocking. Women have long been held to different standards at work and punished more harshly for failure or incompetence (real or imagined), especially in fields that remain heavily male-dominated. Thanks to the usual cocktail of gender stereotypes and biases behind it all, the AI-usage double bind is then almost all too predictable: if a woman uses AI, she must be struggling. But if she doesn\u2019t use it, she\u2019s judged, too.Whether in business, investing, AI, or any other area, women aren\u2019t necessarily risk-averse, but risk-smart, alert to what\u2019s at stake and understandably uninterested in gambles where they know they\u2019re likely to lose far more than men will.Women have been less optimistic about new technologies before as well. We were more sceptical in the early days of the Internet, more cautious about online shopping, and more concerned about digital privacy. Today, we still look at modern tech through less rose-tinted glasses than men.Perhaps the reason women so often do more of the worrying and the damage-anticipating is that we\u2019re more attuned to the fact that our society, and the people running it, can\u2019t be bothered to think past the next quarterly report, let alone consider the perspectives, needs, and concerns of \u2018only\u2019 half the human population. The patriarchal-capitalist modus operandi is, after all, to dive headfirst and worry later, or not at all. Profit and market pressures repeatedly override safety, ethics, and sustainability, just as some men\u2019s ambitions repeatedly override women\u2019s well-being.It\u2019s hardly surprising that women aren\u2019t racing to embrace AI tools that were largely designed without them\u200a\u2014\u200aalthough they wouldn\u2019t exist without women\u2019s contributions to computing\u200a\u2014\u200aand are even used against them. If anything, what\u2019s surprising is that more people don\u2019t feel the same way.Without more than a patchwork of regulations, AI\u2019s ballooning energy consumption, its environmental impact, and its impact on our critical thinking skills, creativity, sociality, and shared reality will affect us all. In fact, it\u2019s already impacting us all, to an extent.We should then all worry now, not later, instead of hoping that the same companies that have systematically stolen millions of copyrighted works from authors, artists, journalists, and other creatives will, one day, decide to slow down and act responsibly, of their own will. At some point, perhaps sooner than we think, opting out of AI might not even be possible. Then what? What else might technology built with no brakes and little regard for human and planetary well-being result in? What fresh horrors are we willing to find out the hard way?The solution here is not to encourage women to \u2018lean in\u2019 (yet again) and use just as much AI in their day-to-day lives and work as men do. The solution is for the rest of the world to take women\u2019s caution and the concerns of other marginalised groups seriously.Of course, women\u2019s underrepresentation in AI development and leadership is part of the problem, too. You can\u2019t claim to be building a \u2018revolutionary\u2019 and \u2018society-equalising\u2019 technology when the people designing and governing it represent only a sliver of it. What you get instead is a technology destined to reproduce the very same inequalities and hierarchies that led to this situation in the first place.Perhaps on another, far more egalitarian planet, a technology like AI could truly be the \u2018great equaliser\u2019 some imagine it to be. Perhaps there, it could actually lead to better outcomes for everyone. But sadly, we don\u2019t live there; we live here.And any technology we come up with is automatically plugged into the social machinery of this world and this reality. The two evolve together and feed into each other, mirroring all that\u2019s good and all that\u2019s ugly.Women\u2019s scepticism about AI, and our reluctance to use it, may ultimately be just scepticism about the state of everything else around us.Share
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Image licensed from ShutterstockThe No\u00f6sphere is an entirely reader-supported publication that applies recent social science research to the cultural, political, and technological issues shaping our world today. If you read it every week and value the labour that goes into it, consider supporting it by liking or sharing this essay, buying me a coffee, or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6325,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[676],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tech-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/daiilynews.cu.ma\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/daiilynews.cu.ma\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/daiilynews.cu.ma\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daiilynews.cu.ma\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daiilynews.cu.ma\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6324"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/daiilynews.cu.ma\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6324\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daiilynews.cu.ma\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/daiilynews.cu.ma\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daiilynews.cu.ma\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daiilynews.cu.ma\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}