By: Heidi Kwok, Staff Writer
“Raise your hand if you use AI regularly in some capacity.” The atmosphere in the classroom instantly tensed — was this seemingly harmless question actually a trap set out by our professor to weed out the academic non-believers? After what felt like minutes, several hands reluctantly shot up. Alarmingly, most of them were from the students who identified as men. Thankfully, the impromptu questionnaire did not lead to a bunch of failing grades and the lecture went forward as usual.
However, it underscored a more pressing issue with artificial intelligence (AI) use: research shows that men are more likely to adopt generative AI tools such as ChatGPT in professional settings than women. This staggering imbalance contributes to the pre-existent workplace gender gap.
These findings were published in a 2024 working paper conducted by the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute for Economics, in conjunction with the University of Copenhagen. After surveying 100,000 workers across 11 fields in Denmark, the study found that women were “less likely to use ChatGPT than men in the same occupation.” The paper also reported that women faced more “adoption barriers” to AI — but didn’t elaborate on what these barriers were — and concluded there was a need for more AI training. Other research suggests this gender divide in AI adoption is due to ethical reasons. This includes women’s concerns of being negatively perceived if caught using AI to take “shortcuts,” such as being accused of cheating and fears of being reprimanded.
What concerns me most about this gender divide in AI use is the framing around women who refuse AI. It’s not seen as an informed decision on their part, but as an assumption of incompetence and lacklustre ability to interact with AI tools.
This false narrative offers yet another excuse for employers to justify the denial of career advancement opportunities for women, including promotions, leadership roles, and wage increases, in favour of their men colleagues.
The motherhood penalty is a glaring example of how women are deemed less qualified and their labour devalued due to conflicting familial responsibilities.
The reasons behind women’s reluctance to integrate AI tools vary, but to me, the underlying misogyny being communicated by these studies is clear: women are to blame for their own incompetence — they don’t recognize the “value” AI can bring in boosting business productivity. However, contrary to these sexist surface-level assumptions, the truth is much more complex and rooted in AI’s inherent gender bias. It’s no secret that content generated by AI often reinforces gender stereotypes and excludes diverse lived experiences, since it reflects its training data, which in turn reflects a sexist world. This brings us to the question: why would women be even willing to narrow the gender gap by adopting harmful AI tools?
Misportraying women’s apprehension towards AI tools as a skill issue rather than a question of ethics is a distraction, which seeks to redirect the blame of existing workplace gender inequalities on women while overlooking the more dominant role of patriarchal systems. Simply put, women shouldn’t have to lean into the very tools that are marginalizing and recreating their oppression. Racialized women and those with temporary status are perhaps most at risk of this misleading assumption. In a volatile labour market rife with unemployment, this demographic will no doubt become the primary target of automation and the subject of the first of many layoffs to come.