Women trust AI less—but no one’s asking them

As our tech overlords continue pumping more resources into AI development and innovation—responsibly, of course—they’re facing a massive trust gap: the people they want to use the tech keep asking who the technology is actually for.

Is it for those who clamor for a surveillance state? Is it meant to help us compete with other nations? Or is it for replacing employees—and deciding which ones should lose their job? A vast majority of these decisions are made by wealthy men in government and industry. 

According to a study released Wednesday by Harvard University researchers, which included a survey of more than 5,000 US adults, women reported that they are habitually excluded from those conversations—let alone the decision-making—compared to men. Women are disproportionately concentrated in jobs most vulnerable to automation by AI tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini—more than 80 percent of women face such risks, according to the National Partnership of Women and Families—and were more likely to say they didn’t have sufficient access to information and training about how the tools are used in their workplaces.

It’s therefore no surprise that the study found women less likely to trust AI tools, and the information they did get about them, than men. (The researchers note that most respondents identified as men or women, and that the analysis therefore “centers on these two groups, though we recognize that not everyone identifies within a gender binary.”)

“Independent researchers rank among our respondents’ most trusted sources on AI, and caution is part of what they offer,” Laura Manley, the executive director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center told me. The US employment landscape offers little government or industry regulation on how employers incorporate AI technology into the workplace, or what specific products are promoted to the public. But women are “rarely quoted as experts,” Manley continued—according to data the researchers collected from July 2025 to June 2026, among the well over 100,000 experts cited in domestic news coverage of AI, men appeared 4.3 times more often than women.

AI tools, the study found, were disproportionately seen as by and for men—women weren’t seen to have the same level of authority or perceived expertise on the technology, and male and female respondents in the study agreed that “men’s needs and perspectives are better represented in AI development and AI-generated content.”

Women, meanwhile, were more likely to report concern and skepticism around AI: a sentiment many leading figures at the world’s largest AI firms do not want to hear, and an especially unwelcome perspective in a sector where a leading AI CEO—and the world’s richest man—already loves to complain about feminism.

AI, in other words, is a boys’ club—and some of its leading figures like it that way.