Women Are More Resistant To AI Than Men — And It Could End Up Hurting Them. Here’s Why.

When it comes to embracing artificial intelligence, men seem to be all in: Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg wants people to befriend AI to combat the loneliness epidemic. Elon Musk believes AI will “most likely” be good for mankind ― with “only a 20% chance of annihilation.” (Phew.) Jeffrey Katzenberg, the co-founder of DreamWorks, boasted that AI could eliminate 90% of the people currently working in the animation industry, as if that’s a good thing. 

Those are big names, but research on AI suggests the same thing in the general population: Men are in their AI experimental phase, by and large, while women are more conservative in their usage.

Women are adopting AI tools at a 25% lower rate than men on average, despite the fact that it seems the benefits of AI would apply equally to men and women, one study published in August by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University and Harvard University found. 

When it came to AI usage on phones, the gender divide is even more striking; between May 2023 and November 2024, a mere 27.2% of total ChatGPT application downloads were estimated to have come from women. Claude and Perplexity ― two other popular AI models ― had similarly low buy-in from women. 

Women may worry that using AI will make them look ‘less competent’ 

The researchers found that, in some cases, women opted out of AI because they wondered if it was ethical to use the tools.

In other instances, women worried that their skills and knowledge would be questioned if they used AI, said Rembrand Koning, one of the co-authors of the study and a Harvard Business School associate professor. 

“This is speculation and something we are hoping to test in future work, but I think men don’t feel like they will be judged as ‘dumb’ if they use AI,” he told HuffPost. “A male software engineer who finds a clever application of AI is likely to be celebrated by their boss.” 

But it’s different for working women: A sizable body of sociological research shows that women’s expertise is often questioned in the workplace, “so for a female software engineer, it may be that they are worried that if they use AI, their manager might view them as less competent,” Koning said. 

Female students ― particularly high-achieving ones ― are also less likely to use AI tools compared to their male peers, a 2024 study conducted by Swedish and Norwegian researchers showed.

“Our results suggested that women may worry more about whether they are ‘doing the right thing’ when using AI for help,” said Catalina Franco, one of the study’s co-authors and a researcher at the Centre for Experimental Research on Fairness, Inequality and Rationality at the Norwegian School of Economics.

It’s possible that high-performing women may be imposing self-restrictions on AI use, Franco told HuffPost.

“For example, top-performing female students may be more cautious about using tools that have not been explicitly endorsed by their professors or may worry that reliance on AI could signal a lack of competence,” she said. 

“If men are less risk-averse, they may be less worried about potential penalties for using AI and more willing to try it out despite the controversy,” she added.

AI is designed with men in mind

Beyond being less cautious, men are also more likely to have an interest and enroll in STEM fields, which translates to having a general interest in emerging technology like AI. But they have an extra advantage when it comes to AI: The tech is more friendly to male users. 

AI ― developed by a mostly white male workforce ― has been trained on the questions and preferences of men, said Randi Williams, an AI researcher at Day of AI, a free, hands-on curriculum of lessons and activities designed to introduce K–12 students to AI.

“The disparities in the adoption of generative AI is a design problem, not a gender problem,” she said. “Women may not be jumping on the AI bandwagon for the simple reason that the tech isn’t built with them in mind.”

Women would prefer AI job interviewers

There have been a handful of studies on where women are more inclined to use AI. 

For instance, for job interviews, women are more inclined than men to prefer being interviewed by an AI interviewer rather than a human recruiter, according to researchers from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands. 

“We actually found the opposite of ‘hesitancy’ among women, and this was a real-world experiment with 70,000 job seekers,” said Brian Jabarian, one of the study’s co-authors and an economist at the University of Chicago.

The surprising findings suggest women may view AI as a fairer judge than actual humans. 

“My hypothesis ― it remains to be proved ― is that women might expect bias in human interviews for historical reasons, even if there is no actual gender discrimination in our setting ― and therefore lean toward AI to reduce that perceived potential risk,” Jabarian told HuffPost.

Why does opting in ― or out ― of AI matter? 

Some healthy skepticism about AI is great ― and there’s plenty of reasons to be cautious about it, from privacy concerns to worries about it outputting biased results that reflect or perpetuate biases that already exist in society. Then there’s fears about job displacement due to automation. Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who’s been called the “Godfather of AI” because of his early work in the field, recently said that he worries that companies’ embrace of AI will create massive unemployment and a huge rise in profits. 

Others are hopeful that generative AI has the potential to transform productivity in a positive way and reduce inequality ― but that obviously won’t happen if women aren’t opting in. 

If it really is inevitable that AI will change the workforce, now is the time for women to be strategic about up-skilling and experimenting. If not, the disparity in AI use could widen the gender gap in pay and job opportunities.

“AI literacy is crucial; it ensures that we build technology that benefits everyone and prepares people to effectively navigate the future workforce,” Williams said.

What matters at this stage of AI is not simply who adopts AI first, but how they use it once they do, said Dishita Turakhia, a researcher who studies the intersection of human-computer interaction at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“Early adopters may help expand the creative boundaries of these technologies, but those who enter later, sometimes with more caution, often bring a critical lens that leads to more sustainable applications,” she told HuffPost. 

“Like they say, ‘the early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese,’” she joked. 

In the workforce settings, the cautious approach that women can bring serves as both a strength and a challenge.

“Those who pause to interrogate the ethics and sustainability of AI adoption are often better prepared to foresee and mitigate risks, which is invaluable for organisations,” Turakhia said.