Women Talkin' 'Bout AI The Gender Gap in GenAI: Usage, Power, and Whose Voices Count
In this episode of Women Talkin’ ‘Bout AI, we start by discussing the findings of a 2024 study "Global Evidence on Gender Gaps and Generative AI" (🔗 below). One overall finding is that women are 20–25% less likely than men to use generative AI, which unspools into something bigger: a story about power, voice, and who gets to shape the future.
We also discuss own experiences in tech, noticing how the gender gap in AI isn’t just about access to tools. It’s about what counts as legitimate work, whose voices are amplified, and how cultural scripts around “cheating,” confidence, and authority get absorbed into the most influential technologies of our time.
We talk about:
🔹 Why women’s hesitation around AI isn’t simply resistance, but often a reflection of ethics and identity.
🔹 How underrepresentation today could mean future AI systems are trained on a distorted mirror of humanity.
🔹 What it means to think of AI as both a child we’re raising and a cultural intermediary that’s already reshaping our sense of normal.
🔹 the WEIRD AI Framework: WEIRD is a term from psychology that stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. Most AI systems, generative models especially, are trained on corpora that overrepresent WEIRD voices and underrepresent everyone else.
🔹 Practical ways women can experiment, reclaim, and band together in communities of practice.
🔹 If AI is the new baseline for productivity and creativity, then the absence of women’s voices isn’t just a gap, it’s a risk of silence becoming the default.
Learn more:
🔗 Gender gap study: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=66548
🔗 Mo Gawdat's book Scary Smart: https://www.mogawdat.com/scary-smart
🔗 Geoffrey Hinton Says AI Needs Maternal Instincts: https://www.forbes.com/sites/pialauritzen/2025/08/14/geoffrey-hinton-says-ai-needs-maternal-instincts-heres-what-it-takes/
💙 Follow us on our Substack: Women Writin' 'Bout AI: https://substack.com/@womenwritinboutai
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