There's a Reason Women Aren't Swooning Over AI Like Men Are
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There's a Reason Women Aren't Swooning Over AI Like Men Are<br>Or rather, a great many reasons
Katie Jagielnicka<br>Dec 05, 2025
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The gender gap in AI usage has been making headlines lately.<br>Women, it turns out, are more likely than men to avoid the various AI tools increasingly populating (or polluting) our world.<br>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’s. On smartphones, the gap widens even further: only 27% of ChatGPT app downloads come from women.<br>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 — women hold fewer than 14% of senior executive positions in the industry. But Harvard’s study also found that the usage gap remains even when women are explicitly given opportunities to learn and use AI tools.<br>The gap’s root causes just aren’t as simple as women being ‘less into technology’ or lacking exposure or training.<br>But they shouldn’t 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 ‘deepfakes.’ That was circa 2018 or 2019, by which point they’d already been around for a year or two.<br>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.<br>By the end of 2020, more than 85,000 deepfake videos were circulating online — 95% 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 — like Elon Musk’s zombie Twitter, also known as X — can 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.<br>But it’s not only public figures either. Various AI tools are also weaponised against ordinary women and children. Some are explicitly built to ‘undress’ women, or, as their creators shamelessly advertise, to ‘nudify’ them. Others are used to identify vulnerable or ‘controversial’ content in women’s social media posts — such as speaking about sexual harassment or calling out misogyny — and then to automate harassment campaigns.<br>And if AI industry’s misogynistic offerings weren’t enough, there’s also the issue of gender bias baked right in, courtesy of the biased, unfiltered, and often unethical datasets these models are trained on.<br>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’s 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.<br>Publicly available generative AI tools are — surprise, surprise — no 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’s output doesn’t even accurately reflect real-world...