The Gender Gap & GenAI
As GenAI becomes more ubiquitous, research alarmingly shows that women are using these tools at lower rates than men across nearly all regions, sectors, and occupations.
A recent paper from Harvard Business School, Berkeley, and Stanford researchers synthesizes data from 18 studies covering more than 140k individuals worldwide.
Their Findings:
Women are approximately 22% less likely than men to use GenAI tools
Even when controlling for occupation, age, field of study, and location, the gender gap remains
Web traffic analysis shows women represent only 42% of ChatGPT users and 31% of Claude users
Factors Contributing to the Gap:
Lack of AI Literacy: Multiple studies showed women reporting significantly lower familiarity with and knowledge about generative AI tools as the largest gender gap driver.
Lack of Training & Confidence: Women have lower confidence in their ability to effectively use AI tools and more likely to report needing training before they can benefit from generative AI.
Ethical Concerns & Fears of Judgement: Women are more likely to perceive AI usage as unethical or equivalent to cheating, particularly in educational or assignment contexts. They're also more concerned about being judged unfairly for using these tools.
The Potential Impacts:
Widening Pay & Opportunity Gap: Considerably lower AI adoption by women creates further risk of falling behind their male counterparts, ultimately widening the gender gap in pay and job opportunities.
Self-Reinforcing Bias: AI systems trained primarily on male-generated data may evolve to serve women's needs poorly, creating a feedback loop that widens existing gender disparities in technology development and adoption.
As educators and AI literacy advocates, we face an urgent responsibility to close this gap, and simply improving access is not enough. We must target AI literacy training programs, organizations committed to developing more ethical GenAI, and safe and supportive communities like our Women in AI + Education to help bridge this expanding digital divide.
You can read the full study here.
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