Women adopt AI 25% less than men partly due to harassment and bias

Women are adopting AI tools at significantly lower rates than men, with new research revealing a 25% gender gap in adoption driven by harassment, bias, and discrimination embedded in AI systems. This disparity threatens to create a technological divide that could impact women’s career prospects and exclude them from shaping future AI development.

The numbers: Recent data shows stark gender differences in AI adoption and experience.

• 50% of men use generative AI tools compared to just 37% of women, according to the Survey of Consumer Expectations
• Harvard Business School research found women adopt AI tools at a 25% lower rate than men
• A 2025 survey from the National Organization for Women (NOW), a women’s rights advocacy group, found 25% of women experienced AI-enabled harassment, including deepfake pornography
• Analysis of 133 AI systems across industries revealed 44% showed gender bias

Why women are hesitant: Negative experiences with AI are creating lasting psychological impacts that discourage adoption.

• Professor Ganna Pogrebna from the Alan Turing Institute, a UK-based AI research organization, explained that “early negative experiences with AI systems—particularly those involving misogyny, sexualization, or coercion—can have profound psychological, behavioral, and societal consequences for women and girls”
• A 2024 report found generative AI is worsening non-consensual intimate imagery sharing in schools, with female students most often depicted in deepfake content
• Pew Research found 33% of women under 35 report experiencing sexual harassment online, compared to 11% of men—a figure that doubled from 2017 to 2021

The workplace impact: AI bias in hiring and professional settings is reinforcing existing inequalities.

• Amazon scrapped an AI recruiting tool in 2018 that showed bias against women
• UNESCO’s 2024 research highlighted that AI hiring tools penalize women through “reproduction of regressive stereotypes”
• Dr. Sarah Myers West from the AI Now Institute, a research organization focused on AI’s social implications, noted AI is “intermediating access to our resources or our life chances” in ways that are “profoundly consequential”

What experts are saying: Researchers warn this gender gap will have cascading effects on technology development and women’s participation.

• “I think we will see a widening gap in terms of women’s access to and uptake of new technologies,” said Laura Bates, author of “The New Age of Sexism: How AI and Emerging Technologies Are Reinventing Misogyny”
• “This will have a devastating impact on everything from women’s job prospects and careers to their involvement in further developments in the sector,” Bates added
• Professor Sandra Wachter from Oxford Internet Institute questioned: “Who is this technology actually good for? And who does it actually benefit?”

The bigger picture: AI systems are reflecting and amplifying existing societal biases rather than creating neutral tools.

• Large language models trained on internet data risk “encoding toxic gender stereotypes and normalizing misogynistic narratives,” according to Pogrebna
• A 2024 JAMA study found AI image generators are more likely to depict physicians as white and male
• UNESCO research found “AI-based systems often perpetuate (and even scale and amplify) human, structural and social biases”

Looking ahead: Experts say regulatory intervention is needed to prevent AI from perpetuating discrimination.

• Bates called for government regulation “at the point they are rolled out to public or corporate use” to ensure safety and ethics standards before implementation
• Pogrebna emphasized that “the marginalisation of women in AI is not an inevitable by-product of technological advancement—it is the result of design choices, governance gaps, and historical inequities”
• Technical fixes alone are insufficient without regulatory frameworks to enforce accountability