The AI Gender Gap at Work: Why Women Get Less Credit for Using AI (and How to Close It)

Oct 26

10 min read

Updated: 4 days ago

Black woman with curly hair in a navy blazer half-closes her laptop at an office desk: the AI gender gap at work

Erica Anderson Rooney is an ex-CPO turned executive coach and AI educator on a mission to get more women into positions of power and keep them there. She is the author of The AI Gap (2026), host of the Glass Ceilings & Sticky Floors and AI Voice or Victim podcasts, and NC Chapter Lead for Women Applying AI. Her SNAP and AI Continuum frameworks are taught to thousands of women through CHIEF, WICT, and Fortune 500 leadership programs. She is the sought-after speaker at the intersection of women, AI, and leadership.

You used AI to build the first draft of the deck, and it saved you three hours. Your boss even said "this is great," and you said thank you, but you left out the part about how you made it.

You are not the only one doing that. The AI gender gap at work lives in that exact moment, when a smart woman does good work with a new tool and then never mentions that she used the tool to do that good work. Maybe that was okay before, but times are different now.

The Quiet Way We Hide Our AI Use

Here is what it looks like from the inside. You have tried ChatGPT, Copilot or Claude. You have used it to write a better email, handle admin tasks like meeting summaries, or maybe draft a performance review you were dreading. But you use it on the side, a little carefully, and you do not bring it up in meetings. You keep that secret to yourself.

Man presents at a wall screen in a meeting while a woman with a dark ponytail sits quietly with her laptop open

Meanwhile, the guy two desks over says "I had AI pull this together" in the team meeting like it is a badge of honor. The next thing you know, your leader is asking him to show everyone else how it's done. You already know how it's done. Maybe you even know a little more, but still, you stay quiet.

You tell yourself you are being careful. The tech is still new and can make mistakes. You've heard everyone talk about bias and hallucinations, and you want people to see you as capable on your own. That instinct makes a lot of sense, but it is also costing you.

I know because I did it too.

For a long time, I hid my AI use. I wanted people to believe I was just that good on my own. I hid how I used AI to do research because it felt a little like cheating. I couldn't shake the feeling that if other people knew I was using it the way I was, they would discount my work and see me as less capable. In reality, I would have found all of that same research on my own... eventually. AI just helped me find it faster. Of course, in the early days, there were a lot of broken links and terrible citations, and I had to weed all of those out. Even then, I still saved massive amounts of time and found data I might have missed.

There was no big moment that changed it. I started showing it, slowly. I remember watching a video on YouTube where a futurist was talking about the turning point of AI. The futurist said that while we were living in a moment where people judged you for using AI, pretty soon they would judge you for not using it. That was the moment I knew I needed to be loud about what I was doing, and I needed to share it with other women.

People were surprised, in a good way. (After all, I'm not "techy.") They asked how I built it. Each positive reaction made the next one easier, until one day I realized I was teaching it.

Now I train executives on AI, I wrote The AI Gap about this exact problem, and I name my AI use on stage. The fear I had shows up in the research. I was living it long before I knew the data.

Why Do Women Use AI Less at Work?

Let's talk about the data, because it's very clear.

In 2026, Lean In surveyed 1,015 Americans with Wired Research and found that men are 22% more likely than women to use AI daily or constantly at work (33% of men vs. 27% of women). Men were also more likely to have ever used AI at work at all (78% vs. 73%).

The gap shows up around the world too. Researchers from Harvard Business School, Berkeley Haas and Stanford pulled together 18 studies covering more than 140,000 people worldwide and found that women are about 20% less likely than men to use generative AI directly. That summary was published by the Harvard Business School AI Institute in 2025.

So why the gap? The Lean In data points to three things.

Women worry about how it looks. Women in the Lean In survey were 32% more likely than men to worry they would be seen as cheating for using AI (29% vs. 22%). I coach female founders and executives, and I can confirm that many of the women I have coached express this exact concern.

Women also get less encouragement. Men were 23% more likely to say their manager encourages them to use AI (37% vs. 30%).

And women get less credit when they do use it. Among people who use AI at work, men were 27% more likely to have been praised for it (23% vs. 18%).

Put those three together. Women are told less often to use the tools, praised less when they do, and more worried about being judged for it. Of course we use it quietly, without telling anyone. The room is built that way.

The Gap Opens Up Where the Money Is

This would be annoying but survivable if AI were a side skill. But AI is now where the jobs and the pay are moving.

In August 2026, LinkedIn reported that women made up just 26% of U.S. AI hires in 2025, compared with 50% of hires into non-AI roles. LinkedIn also found that the typical U.S. AI job posting lists about $177,000 in pay, compared with about $80,000 for a non-AI role.

At the same time, the work women do is more exposed to change. The International Labour Organization's 2025 global index found that in high-income countries, 9.6% of women's jobs fall into the highest exposure category for generative AI, compared with 3.5% of men's jobs.

And the tools themselves carry old bias forward. A University of Washington study of AI resume screening, written up by Brookings in 2025, tested how language models rank resumes. Resumes with men's names were favored in 51.9% of the tests. Resumes with women's names were favored in 11.1%. (Shocking? Or no?)

So women are using AI less, getting less credit when we do, holding fewer of the AI jobs that pay more than double, and getting screened by tools that learned from a history that favored men. History is written in the training data. That is the AI gender gap at work, and it compounds every single year we wait.

The Four Parts of the AI Gap

In The AI Gap, I break this into four gaps: the Awareness Gap, the Authority Gap, the Compounding Gap and the Leadership Gap. Each one is a different place where women lose ground, and each one has a move you can make this week. Here is how they show up at work. More posts like this live in AI at Work.

Awareness: See the System You Are Working In

Awareness is how you see the system.

When you know that managers encourage men to use AI more often, you stop reading your own hesitation as a personal flaw and start reading it as a pattern. (My HR saying has always been: when there is a pattern, there is a problem.) That shift in your thinking matters, because you cannot fix something you think is your fault.

Here is your move. Ask your manager two direct questions this week: "Which AI tool (or tools) does our team expect us to use, and in what way?" and "Is there training or budget for it?" Asking is how you get the same information the men around you are already being handed.

If the answer is "we have not decided," that is useful too. It tells you the rules are still evolving, and you can help write them. (More on that in a minute.)

Authority: Make Your AI Work Visible

Authority is how the system sees you. If the system cannot see your work, you do not get seen, promoted or paid.

Visibility at work has always mattered for women. AI raises the stakes, because more of the record of who did what now lives inside the tools, the dashboards and the systems. If your best thinking happens off to the side, out of view, and nobody hears how you got there (or even what you did), the credit goes to whoever said it loudest or first.

Here is your move. Stop hiding the tool. Say it clearly and put your judgment in the same sentence. (Your judgment is the most important piece of this. It is what makes you invaluable.)

"I used Claude to build the first draft, then I spent my time on the analysis and the recommendation. Here is what I recommend." Then state your case.

Another example could be:

"I had AI pull the data from the last six quarters, analyze it, and write it into this interactive HTML document so I could focus on what it means for Q1 and how we should adjust our strategy for growth."

Woman with a dark bob in a burgundy blazer presents a chart on a wall screen to three attentive leaders

Do you see what those two examples do? They show you know how to use AI, and they show your thinking is the part that matters. Put lines like that in your weekly update and your one-on-one notes, and do not skip your self-review. Keep the receipts. Remember, if there are no receipts, it didn't happen.

Compounding: Turn the Hours You Save Into Bigger Scope

Compounding is turning income into leverage.

In the book, I lay out the chain this way: early adopters gain skill velocity, skill velocity increases visibility, visibility drives promotion, and promotion drives pay. The hours AI gives back are the first link in that chain. Where you spend them decides whether the chain ever reaches your paycheck. And those hours compound.

But be aware, because here is the trap. When women save time, the time usually gets filled with more of the same work, or with the invisible work nobody else picked up. That does nothing for your title or your pay.

Here is your move. For the next two weeks, write down every task where AI saved you time and roughly how much. (Quantifying this is a big piece most people miss.) Then put those hours toward one thing that makes an impact and has your name all over it: the project leadership is watching, the analysis nobody else had time to do, the pilot you have been wanting to propose. Then bring that data to your next review. "I freed up about five hours a week and used it to build X" is a sentence that gets women airtime and visibility, and that turns into promotions and pay.

Leadership: Get in the Room Where the AI Rules Get Written

Leadership is defining what lasts.

Right now, companies are deciding which tools to buy, who gets trained, and how AI gets used in hiring, reviews and promotions. Those decisions will shape careers for the next decade. If women are not in those rooms, the rules get written without us, and the tools keep learning from a history that left us out.

Here is your move. Raise your hand for the AI working group, the pilot team or the policy conversation. The most useful person in that room is the one asking the questions that protect people. And if your company doesn't have any of that, sign up for your own training. Educate yourself. AI is what economists call a general-purpose technology, something that changes the way we live and the way we work. Electricity and computing are other examples.

Woman with a short black pixie cut in a green blouse raises her hand in a six-person team session at a round table

One more thing. There are two questions I ask in every room I train: "Who owns it when the AI gets it wrong?" and "Can a human defend every decision this tool helps us make?" That second one matters most in hiring. When a screening tool favors men's names in more than half of the tests, somebody needs to be in the room saying so. That somebody can be you. (This is just one example of how AI can sound confident without having the full understanding and context to make the right decision. That is where YOU get to shine and show your skills and expertise.)

What the AI Gender Gap at Work Means for You

The women who learn to use AI in the open, make their thinking visible, and put the saved hours toward bigger work are going to be the women who move up. The women who keep using it quietly, or not at all, are going to keep doing excellent work that somebody else gets credit for.

What I Want You to Take From This

The gap is real and measurable, and being careful will not close it. Use the tools, say that you use them, and make sure the hours you save turn into scope, visibility and pay.

Pick one move from this post and do it this week. Just one. You do not need to learn autonomous workflows in an afternoon. These skills build on each other, so start small and slow. Trust me, the skills compound.

Want to know what AI companies now look for in the people they hire? Here is how to AI-proof your career from the job you already have.

Want to Know How to Talk to the Machine?

If you are new to AI, or you have been using it quietly and want to use it with confidence, start with HER AI Fundamentals. It is one live hour where I show you how these tools work, what goes into a prompt that gets you something useful, and which tool to use for what. It is $47, and you walk away able to put AI to work on your real job.

See what's inside

You can sit with us. I am cheering you on.

Erica

Frequently Asked Questions

Is there an AI gender gap at work?

Yes. In 2026, Lean In found that men are 22% more likely than women to use AI daily or constantly at work, and men are more likely to be encouraged by their managers and praised for using it. LinkedIn found that women made up just 26% of U.S. AI hires in 2025. In The AI Gap, I call this the compounding distance between the people shaping AI and the people being shaped by it.

Is it cheating to use AI at work?

No. Using AI to draft, summarize or analyze is part of doing your job well. Women are 32% more likely than men to worry about being seen as cheating, which is exactly why so many of us hide it. Say how you used it and put your own judgment front and center.

How do I get credit for work I do with AI?

Name the tool and your thinking in the same sentence, like "I used AI for the first draft, then focused on the recommendation." Put it in your weekly updates and your self-review, and track the hours AI saves you. That is the Authority part of The AI Gap: if the system cannot see your work, you do not get seen, promoted or paid.