Ed Helms (1:53)

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Bridget Todd (2:26)

There are no girls on the Internet is a production of iHeartRadio and unbossed creative Foreign. I'm Bridget Todd and this is. There are no girls on the Internet. According to a growing body of research, women are using AI in the workplace less than men. We're less likely to experiment with it and more likely to be skeptical of AI too. But does this mean that women are falling behind economically, financially and professionally? Or are we actually just asking the wrong questions? To dig into all of this, I'm joined by my friends Samantha and Annie over at the podcast Stuff Mom Never Told you'd to look at what the research says and what it leaves out about women, AI and work.

Annie (3:15)

Hey, this is Annie and Samantha and.

Samantha (3:17)

Welcome to Stuff I Never Told you'd a production of iHeartradio. And today we are once again so happy to be joined by the incredible, the irreplaceable Bridget Todd. Welcome, Bridget.

Bridget Todd (3:36)

Thanks for having me. So lovely to be back.

Samantha (3:40)

Yes, thank you so much for being back. You and I were chatting about how stressful these times can be. So the holidays, those times being so. Thank you for making the time. We always love talking to you. How are you, Bridget? How have you been?

Bridget Todd (3:57)

I'm not bad. We were talking off mic about how it is a known issue with me. I'm a Grinch. I don't like the holidays. When people ask, you know, this time of year, people are like, what are you doing for the holiday? I like my fur. I can feel my fur go up. You know, I just don't like it. My heart beats a little bit faster and I just, I just find the holiday season extremely stressful. And, and especially when you're someone who is self employed, it's like, hey, you know the work that you usually do, what if you did that work plus a week's worth of work on top of it and then that'll buy you a week off. What will you be doing with that time? Going to see your family? Notably not stressful activity. It's like, I just find it like a stress sandwich, essentially. I can't handle it. I cannot hang with the holidays.

Samantha (4:46)

Well, as I said, Samantha, you and Samantha would agree on this. I mean, I also think they're very stressful. Yesterday we had a, we went to the office for a sminty team meeting. We go like, Samantha and I go once a year. And our producer Christina was like, how are you? And I was like, I'm so tired.

Bridget Todd (5:13)

Just a deep sigh. Yeah. And then it's the end of the year. It just, I just always feel like it's like everything catching up with you all of the year. It's been a heavy year. It's something about like, by the time it hits December, I'm just so freaking done. Just done. Spent.

Samantha (5:34)

Yeah. And then you have the new year barreling in on you and you're like, well, it's still gonna be rough, but it has all these expectations of maybe something will change and not really.

Bridget Todd (5:48)

Yeah, the new year I'm actually okay with because you get to have those couple of days where you buy a new journal and some new pens and for a brief moment you're like, this is gonna be my year. This is gonna the year that it all. I get it all together. It doesn't usually last for me. I usually get about a week out of that, but you get that week, which is not bad.

Samantha (6:08)

And you and Samantha did bond over markers last time?

Annie (6:12)

Oh, yeah, I got a new set. I was gifted a new set, Bridget, just to give you an update.

Bridget Todd (6:18)

How are they writing?

Annie (6:18)

I had to get used to it because it was a lot free flowing, a lot more free flowing than my previous one. So I had to practice with them so I didn't mess up my tiny coloring books.

Bridget Todd (6:30)

A good set of pens, a good set of markers. It really will have you believing this is going to turn everything around.

Annie (6:35)

For a split second I was like, I can color within the lines. And then I was like, no, I cannot.

Samantha (6:44)

Well, the topic you have brought today for us, Bridget, is so, so timely. I've been thinking about this because, I mean, it's hard to escape. But also you get to the end of the year and you have like, Merriam Webster chooses their word of the year and it's slop as an AI slop. And then you have time chooses their person of the year, and it's like the architects of AI and it's like all dudes. And yesterday when we were at the office, we were having kind of a team meeting and it came up, we were talking about AI and our jobs and what does that look like? So what are we talking about specifically today, Bridget?

Bridget Todd (7:24)

Today we are talking about the reality that women are using AI tools a lot less than men in the workplace. There is a definite, well studied, well documented gender gap when it comes to the usage of AI. And I feel you, because I think as a podcaster especially, but any kind of creative. The first conversation that comes up when it's like a bunch of podcasters together is, are you using AI in your work? How are you seeing AI show up? Or people asking Are you afraid of AI? Do you see AI taking your job one day? Like, you won't have a job. People will be listening to AI podcasts, all of that. Right. Those conversations are everywhere. But. And I think oftentimes those conversations can be grounded in a kind of hype. And so I think the fact that AI is not being adopted equally by people of all genders at the same rates is pretty interesting. So I wanted to talk through what we know about the data when it comes to the gender gap in AI, but I think I might be coming at this from a little bit of a different place. Right. You know, in a lot of the research, they automatically assume two points that I want to call out early, that I'll return to. One, women adopting AI less is going to be bad for women. I'll talk about this later, but I don't know about treating that like a foregone conclusion. And then this is kind of an offshoot of something that I hear a ton when talking about AI. AI is inevitable. If you don't get with the program, you're going to be left behind. I have people who tell me that not being into AI right now is like not using email. You know, it'll be the same kind of thing in a few years. And, you know, if women are adopting it less, the idea that we're going to be less employable, less competitive, making less money overall. And so I want to be clear that I don't really have the answer here, but I. And I want to look at what the research says, but I don't like this idea that frames widespread AI adoption as an inevitable thing that everyone is going to be doing, because it really doesn't leave a lot of room for criticism away around the way that AI is being adopted. It's just repeating. It's inevitable. It's inevitable. It's inevitable. Get on board. I do think that when it comes to adopting any new technology in this way, we shouldn't just be being told to get on board. It's inevitable. Just cram it down people's throats, especially when people are saying, hey, maybe we don't actually like this technology. Hey, maybe this technology isn't good. Right? I love technology. I'm an advocate for knowing the basics of all kinds of technology. But if a technology is showing itself to be ineffective, biased, problematic, full of lies, actually adds work to your plate, I don't know that we should be supposed to be telling people, get on board with it. It's inevitable. If that's actually what they're experiencing, you know.

Samantha (10:09)

Yes, yes. And this has come up a lot at our office of the. At least right now it seems to be adding more work. It's not like actually helping, but that you're told like, no, it's going to really help you out and streamline things. I have to say I had not considered gender gap in AI usage. So I'm really interested about the research that you found.

Bridget Todd (10:36)

Yeah, let's get into it. So I took a look at some of the studies and they all basically confirmed that women are using AI in the workplace a lot less than our male counterparts. Let's look at a meta analysis called Global Evidence on Gender Gaps in Generative AI, published in the Harvard Business Review. So they took a look at 18 surveys and studies covering 143,000 plus individuals across many countries, sectors and occupations. They also combine this survey data with Internet traffic and mobile app download data for major generative AI platforms like Claude and ChatGPT, platforms that have hundreds of millions of users. They found a large, nearly universal gender gap. Here's what they found. They found that the gender gap in generative AI usage is global, persistent and not fully explained by access or occupation, pointing to some deeper social, cultural and institutional frictions. So overall, it just seems like women are not the ones. When people are saying it's inevitable, get on board, you gotta use it. It sounds like by and large that is not coming from women. I'm curious, do these findings surprise you? Like, as women in media, as women in tech and podcasting, is this surprising information?

Samantha (11:52)

For me, it's not. I don't think I'd ever clocked it until I was looking at your outline. But once I looked at the outline, I was like, yeah, yeah. Because most people I know who are into AI are men and they usually have a very like. But it's this cool technology thing about it. And I can't say I have really anyone I can think of, but as a woman that's like that. And I mean, we're going to go over some of the reasons why this is and I thought a lot of them were interesting, but they did resonate with me and I thought like, yeah, that makes sense. Like, I get, I get why there's a hesitance, but I guess I hadn't until I read this, I hadn't picked up on it, but I do. It resonates with me now that I'm like, yeah, that seems right. That seems right.

Annie (12:45)

I think being on like the X lineal community, that's kind of one of Those things that I don't think about. But my partner, who is heavily like even employed into the industry of AI, the difference between him and I are so vast that it's not surprising the way that he has integrated that into his systems, into his life, but also understands how he has to be cautious and how it is one of those things that has to be operated with responsibility. I think that there's that level of understanding. But he is also very, very excited by the possibilities of what AI could do. So there's this level, like in our, in my life specifically now, our responses to AI is me being a little more like dismissive and very much more like negative about the whole thing as where he is trying to play it to his cards, if that makes sense.

Bridget Todd (13:39)

That makes so much sense. And it's funny because you are basically living a microchasm of what the data suggests.

Annie (13:45)

And that's kind of what it feels like when I'm like thinking about it, I'm like, honestly, I feel like I'm living as the stereotype that is this or like this conversation.

Bridget Todd (13:54)

Absolutely. So in this meta analysis, they found that across almost all the data sets they looked at, women are about 20 to 25% less likely than men to be using generative AI. The meta analysis shows women have 22% lower odds of using AI than men. The gap appears across regions, industries, education levels and occupations. So you might hear that and think, okay, but maybe the people who did this, these surveys, got it wrong, looked at the wrong information. That gap, however, cannot be explained by things like survey bias, because they also, as I said, looked at who is downloading tools like Claude and ChatGPT. And that data showed that women compromise. About 42% of ChatGPT website users globally, 27% of ChatGPT mobile app users, and even lower shares of women are using the tool clawed for Manthropic. So this really suggests that the gender gap is at a pretty massive global scale. A couple of notable findings. If women are more senior or have more experience, it does narrow that gender gap a little bit, but it does not completely eliminate that gap. Senior women in technical roles sometimes match or exceed men's usage, but also junior women and women in non technical roles show much larger gaps. So there are a couple of interesting notable outliers there. But in general, just like what's happening in Samantha's household, men are even cautiously sort of gung ho, experimenting with it, thinking pretty optimistically about what AI might be able to do. Women are a little more skeptical. We'll Say. Carvana is so easy. Just a click and we've got ourselves a car. See so many cars. That's a clicktastic inventory.

Maria Hinojosa (15:49)

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Bridget Todd (15:51)

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Annie (15:52)

I mean, that's Clickonomics101.

Ed Helms (15:54)

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Bridget Todd (16:00)

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Ed Helms (16:42)

Hey everyone, it's Ed Helms.

Bridget Todd (16:45)

And I'm Kalpen and we are the.

Ed Helms (16:46)

Hosts of Irsay, The Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club. This week on the podcast, I am talking to film and TV critic, radio and podcast host and Harry Potter super fan Rhianna Dillon to discuss Audible's full cast adaptation of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. What moments in this audiobook capture the feeling of the magical world best for you or just stood out the most?

Bridget Todd (17:15)

I always loved reading about the Quidditch matches and and I think the audio really gets it because it just plunges you right into the stands. You have the crowd sounds like all around you. It is surround sound, especially if you're listening in headphones.

Ed Helms (17:31)

Listen to Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audio Book Club on the iHeartradio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Maria Hinojosa (17:42)

Foreign host of Latino USA Venezuelans around the world are celebrating the takedown of former President Maduro. But inside the country, there is fear and silence. And in the United States, people are concerned about Donald Trump's rogue tactics. Listen to Latino usa, the fall of Maduro and the rise of an unconstrained Trump. That's on your iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Annie (18:33)

Field.

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Samantha (18:50)

I wonder, just because we've been talking a lot on the show about, like, the, quote, male loneliness epidemic, which women are also very lonely, but that's what we're talking about. But I see a lot of stories of men, like, forming these bonds with AI and these relationships with AI, and I have no idea, but I wonder if that's also a part of it, because women usually have more of a support group than men.

Bridget Todd (19:18)

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I absolutely think that some of the way that AI is talked about by people who make it, some of the marketing language and decisions around it, I think reinforce some attitudes that I think are kind of sexist. Right. I remember very clearly it was like a grand opening, grand closing when Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, was introducing this new vocal chatbot for OpenAI's chatbot named Sky. And he basically said that he wanted the experience to be like the experience that people had in the movie her, which, if folks haven't seen that movie, Joaquin Phoenix is basically having a romantic and sexual relationship with an AI chatbot voiced by Scarlett Johansson. And I love that movie. It's one of my favorite movies. But obviously, within the framing of the movie, it is about a man using technology to satisfy his emotional and sexual needs on top of his, you know, admin needs that you might be using AI for already. And so when the head of OpenAI gets on a stage and promises people that they will be able to use technology the same way it is used in this movie, well, I can understand why that might hit women in a kind of a weird way. Right. I can understand why it's like, well, what are you really saying about this technology? That that is your. Your frame of reference for how you envision people using it. Do you. Do you know what I mean?

Samantha (20:46)

Yes, yes, absolutely. And going back to one of the other points he made at the beginning that comes up in these arguments of why women aren't using AI as much as it did kind of remind me of the argument around stem. Like, a lot of STEM things where it's like, well, they just. That's not how their brain works or they don't pursue those fields because of whatever. Xyz. So that feels very similar to me.

Bridget Todd (21:16)

Oh, yes. I'm so glad that you brought that up, because when you look at how the other conversations around gender gaps that we know exist in workplaces more broadly and leadership roles more broadly, stem roles more broadly. Often, just as you said, the pushback is that women maybe are picking less lucrative work or fields. If you're Larry Summers, maybe it's the idea that women are just innately less good at these fields or something. Now, never mind that that really discounts the question of why fields that are associated with women are historically devalued and underpaid. So even if there was a time where computing was seen as women's administrative or secretarial work, when women were associated with it, it was lower paid admin work. When men became associated with it, very clearly it became a different kind of work. So that's clearly not the women's fault for, you know, for what roles they happen to be choosing. But in any event, not, not only is that not what's really going on and not telling the full story of what's happening in these workplaces, nor is it really what's going on or telling the full story of AI adoption. That's not me saying this. That's according to this meta analysis. As social scientist Katie Gin puts it in a piece called There's a Reason why Women Aren't Swooning over AI like Men Are, which I love that title. She writes, the oft proposed explanation is that women understand this new technology less, largely because they work in roles with lower exposure to it. Women are, after all, still outnumbered in STEM degrees and careers, including AI specific roles. The same is true in AI leadership. Women hold fewer than 14% of senior executive positions in the industry. But Harvard's study also found that the usage gap remains even when women are explicitly given opportunities to learn and use AI roles. So it's not just that women have less training or less access to AI. Even when the people who did this meta analysis equalized for that, they still found that this AI gender gap persist. They looked at a study out of Kenya where women were explicitly offered training and access to AI, yet those women still used ChatGPT 13% less than men. So this seems to suggest these barriers aren't really about access or awareness about AI. It's something else going on.

Annie (23:36)

I feel like there's so many things that I'm trying to work out when it comes to this conversation about whys that seem like, well, obviously A equals bias, B or A is because of B. And one of the things that I'm thinking about is like maybe just what I'm seeing when it comes to things like Chat GPT, which feels like just an advanced version of Google when we made that the thing in researching. But it gives the mediocre man who has a lot more confidence than women in general even more confidence, I guess, in a way, because they think they're getting that answer without having to go to the people who actually found those answers. And in some weird ways, like, there's so many thoughts like, maybe what are some of these reasons that. That we are finding that men are more likely to use it? And that for me, like, that just seems like an irrational process.

Bridget Todd (24:26)

I think that's true. I think twice now I've gotten into a back and forth with somebody on Reddit, and I guess I don't know their gender, but I could tell that they were responding to me using ChatGPT. And I'm like, oh, you didn't. You couldn't. It wasn't worth it. You just wanted to keep the like argument going. But it wasn't worth it for you to come up with your own answer. You're taking the ChatGPT, right? So the meta analysis gave some answers as to what might be going on here, what might explain some of these gaps. I'll tell y' all what they said, and then I'll kind of give you my thoughts on it, because I'm not. Some of these I'm not so sure about. So the first is a lower familiarity and knowledge with AI. So they said women are more likely to report not knowing how generative AI works or how to use it. I'm not totally sold on this. You know, it is in their meta analysis, so I wanted to include it, but this is just my take. AI is not difficult to understand. It is not difficult to use, nor is it terribly complex. There is nobody listening to the sound of my voice who could not figure it out. Who it is outside of the realm of their ability to comprehend it is not terribly complex. I think that what this study is actually highlighting here is I think this tendency for the people who make technology and talk about technology to do so in a way where it seems like the technology they're talking about is so complex and your puny little lady brains could never figure out what we're talking about here. Think about the way that people like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman talk about technology. They talk about it in this way where it gives it this. This gravitas that I think is oftentimes unearned because you don't need any kind of special training to understand the basics of AI. And so I think the fact that tech leaders who, let's be real, often happen to be not just men, but a specific kind of man, not just white men, but a specific kind of white guy, I think the fact that they are consistently talking about this technology in a way that makes it seem like your ordinary person could never understand it, I think it's sort of at play here. And I think that is with intention. I think they do this because they want people to feel I couldn't possibly understand what they're talking about. How could I hold these people accountable? How could I expect things to be better for me? How could I even, you know, oftentimes they're telling people, oh no, no, you want AI. AI is good. People will say no, I know what I like and I know what my experiences are. And I know that I'm not enjoying opening my email, not even be able to use it because AI tools are being voiced it on me non consensually and they're like no, no, no, it's actually great for you, right? That if people truly innately felt like they understood this technology, they would. Tech leaders wouldn't be able to do that anymore.

Annie (27:10)

Right. It really does feel like they're just inflating the importance of it so that we'll believe it and then that when we are forced to use it because we have no way of pushing back and there's actually no regulation anymore on how it's being used, that will just accept how great it is without actually knowing how great it is. It's in the midst of the conversation of knowing how inaccurate it has been in the past. Also, how hard is it when you literally do not have a choice if you use what used to be Google and what you thought would be something that would give you trusted sources and the top of it is literally AI results that you did not ask for. So how hard is it to use when you're not given a choice to whether or not you have to use it?

Maria Hinojosa (27:51)

Right?

Bridget Todd (27:51)

And this is what I'm saying, it goes back to what I was, what I started the conversation with, of how we talk about it as this inevitable technology. We all have to get on board. Things that are good, you don't have to talk about them that way. Things that people want, you don't. That's not how, that's not how you have to frame them. So Sam Wiles said on threads, if AI is a good thing, why are we constantly told it's inevitable. You don't have to do that with good things. No one's ever like, iced coffee is inevitable. So you may as well get used to an this is so correct, right? This is things that are good. You do not have to continue over and over and over again to tell people that they better get on board with this good thing. Like, no, that's not, that's not how we talk about things that people like and are good.

Annie (28:31)

Right. Also, it's not forced upon us by the government. Like, we are not the iced coffee beings told, you have to buy iced coffee when it gets to this temperature. And no state can regulate whether or not you can use it, even though it can be harmful for you. And we have seen harm done by this.

Bridget Todd (28:47)

Sorry. Exactly. That. Another thing this meta analysis found was lower confidence with it and sort of persistence or lower levels of persistence. And so according to the meta analysis, women report less confidence in prompting and are less likely to persist after poor AI outputs. Men, however, are more likely to experiment repeatedly. So I think this is one of those things where essentially what is being said there is women have tried this technology and have identified that it can be janky and have reasonably concluded that maybe it's not worth the pain in the butt to keep trying with it. And men are like, I'm gonna keep on trying. I think that it's like framing women taking, like gleaning from their experiences of AI being full of lies, hallucinations actually being more work for them. Which has been my experience where I've, when I tried to use AI a lot of times I'm like, okay, well I could have done this in the time it took me to get, to finally get AI to do it. I could have done this myself and done a better job at it. So I should have done that to begin with. Wasted time. I don't like how this is framed as women being risk averse, when in reality I think it's more like women making reasonable deductions about the time they want to spend on something that has proved itself to be ineffective. And like, that's, that's not risk averse, that's something else.

Annie (30:17)

That's being tired of arguing with an inanimate object, which is what I've had to do when I'm yelling back at Google, I don't use Siri. But any of those things because they did not understand what I was saying. And I just stare at it and like, why am I doing this with you? And then being told also they remember when they're when you're mean to them.

Bridget Todd (30:36)

Listen, I told this story on my own podcast. There are no girls on the Internet. After I did the episode with you all about Larry Summers, who was formerly on the board of OpenAI, stepping down because of those emails that were revealed between him and convicted child sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein. I was trying to get. I was like, oh, maybe ChatGPT can help me come up with like, metadata and all of that. So I put in what I have to ChatGPT, and ChatGPT says, this is not correct. There is no link between Larry Summers and Jeffrey Epstein. And I was like, oh, really? We don't have emails linking the two. And they're like. And then ChatGPT is like, okay, well, yeah, maybe there's emails, but you're suggesting that something illegal happened and we don't know anything about that. And I was like. I said the emails were creepy. How would you define emails where a grown married man is going to a convicted pedophile for advice on how he can have sex with his mentee? You wouldn't define those as creepy. We got into a huge argument to the point where I asked it. I was like, cut the crap. Are you being so cagey because Larry Summers used to be on the board of OpenAI. That makes you ChatGPT. ChatGPT says, let's be clear, Larry Summers was never on the board of OpenAI. Larry Summers has been on the board of OpenAI since like 2023. So it's been kind of a while. So it's like, not only was that infuriating, think of the work it took for me to tell, like, take stop by workday and have an argument. A real no argument with ChatGPT. This is the technology they're saying is the linchpin of our economy right now. I don't think so.

Annie (32:16)

You literally spent emotions with a computer who is just trying to protect their reputation, which is weird because they're not a human.

Bridget Todd (32:23)

This is what I'm saying. Like, like, I'll tell you something. I have not asked ChatGPT a single thing since then. That was a little experiment to see if it was going to work. It went so astronomically left and I'm like, okay, well, that's a waste of my. Got my blood pressure up, so it's like double bad.

Annie (32:39)

I don't, I don't need this from you too.

Bridget Todd (32:41)

If I'm going to argue with someone, it's going to be a flesh and blood human in my life. That freaking chatgpt.

Samantha (32:47)

Well, I think that's also a good point of like, we've talked about this before several times. Who makes this technology? And the fear of like the biases and all that stuff in there. And I know like Elon Musk and Gronkopedia has had a lot of things come up with what it is saying that are just flat out ridiculous and like these flat out lies. And so I do think that that is a concern. And I would posit that that influences, like, I would guess that women are not getting the answers they want more often than men are not getting the answers that they do want.

Bridget Todd (33:26)

Yes. And something to remember about AI, if there's one thing, even if you're thinking, I'm not a techie, I'm not a computer person, this is not my forte. If there's one thing to remember is that AI, it's easy to think of it as robot computer brains that know everything, all knowing. It's not. It's trained and built by all of us humans. And so the same kind of biases that we know humans have, AI is just trained on all of that to replicate it. Right. And so keep that in mind when you're thinking about AI. We have so much documentation about the ways that AI is biased when it comes to reflecting women in workplaces. It's more likely to reflect women as younger than they actually are. And so if the majority of, let's say, for instance, if the majority of women who are engineers are over 40, if that's just like a documented fact, AI will tell people, oh, they're actually younger than they are because it's reflecting a bias against more mature women. You know, there have been studies that when women ask ChatGPT for negotiation advice, it regularly tells them to ask for less money. Right. So all of the biases that exist in society, AI is simply replicating those because it was trained on all of us. And so really keep that in mind. Like, I could understand why women are not keen about going to this technology to help them understand the world around them in their workplace, when we know it is, it has these biases, right?

Annie (34:54)

I mean, it comes to the other point in that we already understand and know that the data research are based on men and there's not enough based on women or those marginalized communities at all. Like, we just got to the point of realizing, hey, we need more, so more people have been doing it. But all of that information is not there to provide a background for ChatGPT to pick up or whatever AI company. And that's really concerning that we're acting like the information we know now is all we need to know when we know that's not true.

Bridget Todd (35:24)

Exactly. That is such a good way to put it. And another concern that women report about using AI, why they're kind of skeptical about it, is that women have stronger what the meta analysis called kind of ethical concerns. So women are more likely to view using AI, especially in professional settings or education settings, as unethical or cheating. So I don't disagree with this. This totally makes sense to me anecdotally, however, I think it's more complex than that because I don't think it's just that women see AI as cheating. It is that. But I also think that in workplaces and in educational settings, women are more likely to be scrutinized than our male counterparts. Right. And that's just the way that it is. Like, women aren't wrong for being like, oh, I feel like everybody is checking my work extra hard and harder than they're checking Joe's work whatever whatever. The BBC spoke to psychologist Lee Chambers, who said women are more likely to be accused of not being competent, so they have to emphasize their credentials more to demonstrate their subject matter expertise in a particular field. There could be this feeling that if people know that you as a woman use AI, it is suggesting that you might not be as qualified as you actually are. Women are already discredited and have their ideas taken by men and passed off as their own. So having people knowing that you use AI might also play into this narrative that you're not qualified enough. It's just another thing debasing your skills, your competence and your value. Now that makes total sense to me. And I am in professional spaces of all kinds. And in some of these professional spaces, I've been around very accomplished men in tech who will not blink an eye at submitting like an op ed or something or a piece of writing that was clearly written by AI. And it's just like, and I, I would never like the, like the way I would be so embarrassed to have anybody be like, oh, did you submit this? And it was AI generated. I can tell by whatever, whatever. I would crawl into a hole and die. I would be so embarrassed. And the way that I can confirm that there are a lot of men in high up positions who do not feel that level of scrutiny. And it just goes back to like marginalized people in these settings. We're so used to carrying that, the extra eyes, you know, extra scrutiny of why we're here at all, our work, our value, our Competence. Why would you want to inject another reason to give somebody to continue to do that when you're already facing that in multiple levels?

Samantha (37:52)

I have to bring this back to fan fiction, you know, I do. So there's a big, like, concern in the fan fiction space of like using AI and it's become such a thing. And as discussed a lot fan fiction is mostly written by women or non binary people. People will go out of their way to say like in the tags I use EM dashes, but it's not AI. They go way out of their way to be like, I swear it's not AI. And it's just, it's so clear to me that people don't want you to think like, oh, this is not worth. Like, I didn't even put in the time to do this. Whereas, yeah, I do think, I don't think men would see it necessarily in that way. They would see it as like, oh, yeah, it just saved me some time. But meanwhile, now I know that AI uses a lot of EM dashes because of fanfiction.

Bridget Todd (38:48)

Yeah, that doesn't surprise me at all because I think the fanfiction community is definitely a community that values human creativity. Like, you wouldn't be in the fanfiction community if you didn't value human creativity. And it's not, it doesn't surprise me that that's a community that it's also full of women.

Samantha (39:06)

Yes, yes. And people always put this thing too at the top where they're like, please don't feed my work to AI. And I'm like, that's just not going to help you. But I appreciate the effort.

Annie (39:16)

Well, that's the other part to that is when you start thinking about using ChatGPT or any of the situations, you don't know who you're taking from. And there is this level of guilt for me on the end of like not being the creative. But if I'm researching things and I'm just basing it on one small bit of information that's, you know, from ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever whatnot, which is constant and I can't stand it. It feels unethical in that manner of like, we already know artists are really, really on edge because their work is feeling constantly stolen. Creators who are writers who are part of this, researchers who are doing lots of work to get their educations and to be in this field, like using that information and like, oftentimes it's not cited, it just becomes one big blob of information. It feels so gross to See that play out.

Bridget Todd (40:05)

Yeah, that's such a good point. There was this like, micro controversy online a couple of weeks ago about this literary festival, the Black Romance Literary Festival, where the question was, do the people who run this festival, the organizers, will they accept people who use AI in their work at this organization? Will those people be allowed to be included in panels? And so it sounded like they were really talking about illustrations, like cover art. And so the organization gave what to a lot of people in the community felt like not a great answer. This sort of was. They wrote, the organizer said, we don't use AI in our work, but we're not turning away people who do use AI. We want to provide resources and education to those folks, but we don't want to disclude them. One of my listeners made a very good point that it seemed like that was a kind of attempt at a harm reduction kind of position, but maybe they didn't say it like that and perhaps they should have clarified that. But you know, I think at a time when artists, particularly marginalized artists, are really having a hard. Like anybody who tries to make. Make money from making a thing is having a hard time of it right now. And I think when, as you said, Sam, we know when you ask AI to generate an image, it's not generating a new piece. It's just. It's just taking from what's out there. Right. I remember there was a time where people were using an AI tool to make those futuristic selfies. Half of them had watermarks or logos in them somewhere. That's how much they were just taking from other artists, copyrighted work. So I don't think that the creatives who are saying, hey, we need this to be clarified. Hey, we need to put a line in the sand of how, what we're going to do when it comes to taking other artists work in this way, I don't think they're wrong for being anxious about that and expecting and deserving some answers around it, frankly. So when it comes to kind of the reasons why women might not be adopting AI like their male counterparts, I did find this meta analysis pretty useful at like, giving us the scope of the issue, giving us the scope of the gender gap and some reasons as to why that might be. However, I just don't think that some of the answers really spoke to the nuance that I see in that experience as a woman that's a little bit skeptical of AI. So I found this piece in the Stanford Social Innovation Review by Mara Bolas, who, who is the founder of First Prompt and a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School called the AI gender gap paradox. And I think that this piece does a really good job of getting at some of the nuance that's not just women aren't smart enough to get AI or whatever. Right. And so one bit that she pointed out is that women are already doing a lot of work. She writes, more than half of professionals say that learning AI feels like a second job, which for most women is actually a third job, or when you consider the continued disparities in time spent on childcare and housework. And so that I thought was such a good point, right. That doing your current job or your current educational workload or whatever is already a lot of work. If you're a woman, you're probably taking on more of the labor at home, more of the emotional labor, more of the care work, all of that. And on top of it, now people are telling you that if you don't take the time to learn how to integrate AI into that work, you don't really care about your career and you're holding yourself back. I just. Yeah, it's like that. Like that has to be part of the conversation if we're going to actually address the gender gap in AI usage.

Samantha (43:43)

Yes.

Bridget Todd (43:45)

Yeah. And this piece I think also just does a great job of reframing fear or knowledge gaps into what I suspect they actually are, which is the ability to competently analyze risk. Women aren't looking at AI and saying, I'm afraid of it or like, I can never learn it. I think what they're actually saying is I have analyzed the risk that using it might bring into my work, and I've made a decision based on that that I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna be using it like that. That piece in the Stanford Innovation Review looked at studies from Deloitte and Pew. Both of them showed that women predict AI will bring less benefit and do more harm across personal, professional and public life. Men, however, tend to be more optimistic, confident and self assured in their competence. Doesn't that really say at all?

Annie (44:36)

Well, there's so much like when I'm thinking about the amount that we research and the amount that we try to make sure that we are noting who is, you know, referencing and giving credit to whomever. So we're not doing any violent violations, copyright law, any of those things. And again, we know that ChatGPT nor any of the AI really care. They don't care where the sources are coming from. And so as people who know a. That it is not 100% proof. And we are trying to be doing our due diligence and give correct information. Yeah, that is more work to go back to whatever we thought we could use with AI to actually verify that where this information is coming from. Like it's kind of funny when we talk about having research help and having someone else do the research, it feels like more work because I'm like, I don't know if this is true. I gotta go read the whole article again. You know what? I like doing more work and it feels the same way in this type of conversation with AI because I don't completely trust, once again analyzing the risk that this is actually true.

Bridget Todd (45:42)

This might sound way off base, but when I was reading some of the research about why women don't use AI as much, I couldn't help thinking about what a lot of heterosexual women who are married to men or in relationships with men report, where if you ask a man in your life to do something, what you're actually creating is like work for you later when you have to answer the follow up or correct what he's done wrong. I hate that for us women who find themselves in close relation with men. I hate that for us. But like that is what we got, that we're served that all the time. We would be lying. I think every woman listening has had that experience and it's so frustrating. But I think that's it really mirrors to me what women are talking about when they talk about how AI is used in their work. When you have to go and correct the mistake, ask again, give the follow up, whatever it's going to be. That's just adding more and more to your emotional load. Wouldn't it just have been easier for you to do it yourself in the first place?

Samantha (46:44)

Right.

Annie (46:45)

Also that does feel like if we get something wrong as women and marginalized people, we're going to be penalized a lot more than when men do. Men are given excuses and are like, eh, you're fine, it's a one time thing. Or they feel like they can brush it off. Whether it's just maybe they feel like they can do that way as where women have the anxiety of like no, we're going to get the worst punishment ever. Slash marginalized people. So maybe, maybe that's also that level of confidence that we don't have, which is delusional.

Bridget Todd (47:11)

Yes. And I think this speaks to something else that I saw in the Stanford piece that I just thought was so interesting, which is that women self report not feeling confident with how AI works. We might be offered AI skills training, but what we're not really offered is a chance at, like, actual knowledge into this technology, all the issues that go into it, like an actual fundamental understanding and crash course on how it works. The piece cites a Federal Reserve bank of New York survey that shows that when women say they want generative AI training, they are not just looking for skills, they're signaling awareness of this technology's opacity and their unwillingness to trust a system that they don't fully understand. A systemic review of gender and AI adoption and found that women consistently cite things like lack of transparency and the opaque nature of AI tools as barriers to trust. And so it's exactly what you just laid out, Sam. And again, that's not the same thing as not feeling smart enough or competent enough to understand something. It's reasonable to say the people that make AI tools have intentionally designed them and they intentionally talk about them with such a lack of transparency that I don't trust it. That is a really reasonable position. That's not unreasonable. I don't like the framing that this totally reasonable way to be is, you know, bad in some way or that women are shooting themselves in the foot economically by showing this, like, reasonable lack of trust.

Samantha (48:36)

Right.

Annie (48:36)

And you know, another thing to that is, again, I keep coming back to how we've seen the mistakes and maybe that's what it is. This has been so rushed, but the constant times that, like, we see things that are not good are usually really bad for women. Like, I keep thinking about the AI videos of the deep fakes that happened with that Twitch Twitch streamer that we talked about. Was it two years ago, Amy? I don't even remember we had, like. Because we were really talking about the fact things like this is super concerning because it does go after women for, like, just being there.

Bridget Todd (49:06)

Yeah. I mean, that speaks to what I was talking about earlier when we were talking about the way that Sam Altman the way that Sam Altman was presenting, talking about the chatbot they were creating sky, that there are so many examples of the vibes just being sus for women in these spaces. Right. You know, I make a podcast about the intersection of gender and technology, and oftentimes when we talk about AI, we're talking about things like non consensual sexualized deepfakes. We're talking about things like Sam Altman, you know, saying people should be able to have the kind of relationship that Joaquin Phoenix has with the chatbot in the movie Her. We're talking about things like Elon Musk creating a anime teenager kind of sex fantasy chatbot. We're talking about men who build technology, who fill their teams with other men. They lack gender diversity and racial diversity or any kind of real inclusion. And then they talk about women in these, like, misogynistic ways. It's not surprising to me that women are being slower to adopt this technology that is made in such a way, a misogynistic soup. And as Mara Bolas put it in that Stanford Review piece, as in financial systems, women are attuned to the weaknesses in generative AI systems that designers didn't notice or prioritize. Things like bias, privacy risks, unreliable outputs before putting their products out into the world, which speaks to that rushed quality that you were just clocking earlier. Some of the industry's more misogynistic offerings see Grok's Ani fantasy chatbot, or disturbing policies. See, Facebook's leaked policies on children and illicit content are enough to send most users into a kind of tonic depressive spiral. But for women, beyond being offensive, such outputs are evidence of what gets built when developmental teams lack gender diversity. When women engage with systems that they've been largely left out of creating, the products can feel foreign, awkward, or even hostile. And so I think that is absolutely what's going on here. The vibes around how this technology is made, who makes it, who is in the room, who has the power over it, and how that power is being used and wielded to shape the world, all of that sucks for marginalized people. So, yeah, surprise, surprise, those same marginalized people are saying, no, thank you. Y' all can keep it.

Annie (51:30)

Yep.

Samantha (51:31)

And it's not like we don't have historical, societal, systemic evidence of this going wrong for us. I love how men are, like, confident, optimistic. Oh, it's gonna be great. I'm like, Cause it historically has for you. Yeah, guess what? Not so much over here.

Bridget Todd (51:50)

Not so much at all. And I wanted to end on this. When I was researching this, I found this post on Reddit that I thought really did a great job of summarizing my thoughts. So there was a post in the Ask Feminist subreddit, and the post asks, why are women using generative AI less than men? And the Redditor trooper SJP answers, I'm a university professor. If female students are using ChatGPT less than male students, it is the male students we should be worried about. There have been studies showing that there is a negative cognitive impact of using generative AI on learners. This includes loss in ability to retain information, loss of Critical thinking skills, loss of empathy, degradation of writing and math skills, degradation of problem solving skills, and on and on. Furthermore, generative AI is bad for the environment, contributes to environmental racism, is built on stolen data by corporations who will zealously guard their own intellectual property while willingly violating yours, and capitalist excitement in replacing entry level workers with AI is having an immediate negative impact on young job seekers aged 22 to 27, but will have a much more profound impact on all of us when we lose a generation of entry level workers who won't get the experience needed to become experienced workers when the experienced workers retire. ChatGPT is also inaccurate, bland, and produces terrible work full of false information. Furthermore, in classrooms including mine, the use of generative AI is considered an academic integrity violation and will result in a zero for that assignment and forwarding the case to the student conduct board. My students would not appreciate it If I use ChatGPT to create lesson plans, to grade their work, and to write their letters of recommendation. I do not appreciate my students passing off work they didn't write that has a direct negative impact on themselves and the world as their own. So I don't think it is bad that women are less likely to be cheating by using ChatGPT in their work than men. I think it is bad that so many men are wasting their educations by cheating. And I felt like that really summed up what I was trying to say about this reframing. I don't like that this conversation is simply framed as women aren't using AI and thus sort of almost blaming women for all of these systemic reasons and reasonable reasons as to why that might be. And also sort of saying, well, if women weren't so afraid and also stupid about AI, maybe they'd be making more women. It's not society, it's the stupid women. I really think that we need to reframe that and say, well, what are women telling us by not using this technology? Like, should we really just be saying these women are making a bad choice? Shouldn't we really be zeroing in on what women are saying as it pertains to why we are not so gung ho to be adopting this technology the way that men are? That's, that's sort of my. That's sort of my, my. So what in all this, you know.

Annie (54:31)

And I think in the future we're going to come back and have a conversation about the, the red, the lining of this type of usage and this conversation and the growing population of the red pill community. Oh yes, because we're Talking more and more like it has become even more so. Where they have come to the point of saying, of incels, saying being straight and having a relationship with a woman is gay. Like, literally, that's their, like, insult. Have you seen this?

Bridget Todd (54:57)

So the best thing a man can.

Annie (54:59)

Do is, is sleep with a woman.

Bridget Todd (55:00)

Having sex with a woman.

Annie (55:02)

Right. Submitting and pleasing a woman essentially was kind of like that kind of intake. But I really do wonder if this conversation of using ChatGPT to replace that interaction again with a male loneliness epidemic and how it becomes violent. If this conversation and if this push and things like what Sam Altman was trying to do when he first created that chatbot, as well as what Elon Musk is trying to do, creating his chatbot is just opening up a bigger community, a bigger doorway for more incel activity and red pill activity. And we're going to have to come back and have to deal with the consequence of things like AI being a part of this narrative.

Bridget Todd (55:41)

Absolutely. I completely agree. I think those things are totally linked. And I'm in the middle of doing a lot of research about the kinds of sexual and romantic attachments that people create with AI And I think it's complicated because I want people to feel like they have nourishing relationships in their lives. But healthy nourishing relationships come with friction. Like, that's what you get from being in relationship with other humans. And I think that the availability of folks to kind of engage in frictionless relationships where they can just take and take and take and extract and extract and extract and always get what they want out of them. In some ways, I can see why that is therapeutic, but that is not what builds healthy people, like, health. Like, healthy people have to experience relationships with friction. And that's just the bottom line.

Samantha (56:31)

Yes. Yes. Well, topic for a future day.

Bridget Todd (56:36)

Yes. I love it.

Samantha (56:38)

I also have to say, a dude told me the other day, he was like, well, I love AI because it gives me more leisure time. And I was like, well, wait till you don't have a job and then you're not gonna have a way to have that leisure time.

Bridget Todd (56:53)

It'll be all leisure, all the time.

Samantha (56:55)

You won't be able to do all.

Annie (56:57)

Those things you're enjoying stressed out because you have no monies.

Samantha (57:01)

More leisure time. All right, well, thank you so much, Bridget, for coming during the stressful time. We always love talking to you. Can't wait to see you in the new year 2026.

Bridget Todd (57:14)

Yes. We're almost there.

Samantha (57:15)

Almost there. In the meantime, where can the good listeners find you.

Bridget Todd (57:19)

You can find me at my podcast There are no Girls on the Internet where we explore all kinds of issues of the intersection of gender and identity and technology and social media. You can check me out on Instagram bridgetmarie in DC or on YouTube at There are no girls on the Internet.

Samantha (57:33)

Yes, and go do that if you have not already listeners. If you would like to contact us, you can. You can email us at helloephonevertold you do. You can find us on Blue Skype Mom Stuff Podcast or on Instagram and TikTok @StuffOnevertold. We're also on YouTube. We have some new merchandise at Computero and we have a book you can.

Bridget Todd (57:48)

Get wherever you get your books.

Samantha (57:49)

Thanks as always to our super producer Christine, our executive produce Maya and our contributor Joey. Thank you and thanks to you for listening self and never told you'd is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts My Heart Radio you can check out the iHeartRadio app Apple podcast wherever you listen to your favorite show. This is an I heart podcast guaranteed human.