"AI literacy is crucial; it ensures that we build technology that benefits everyone and prepares people to effectively navigate the future workforce," said Randi Williams, an AI researcher.

When it comes to embracing artificial intelligence, men seem to be all in: Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg wants people to befriend AI to combat the loneliness epidemic. Elon Musk believes AI will “most likely” be good for mankind ― with “only a 20% chance of annihilation.” (Phew.) Jeffrey Katzenberg, the co-founder of DreamWorks, boasted that AI could eliminate 90% of the people currently working in the animation industry, as if that’s a good thing.

Those are big names, but research on AI suggests the same thing in the general population: Men are in their AI experimental phase, by and large, while women are more conservative in their usage.

Women are adopting AI tools at a 25% lower rate than men on average, despite the fact that it seems the benefits of AI would apply equally to men and women, one study published in August by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University and Harvard University found.

When it came to AI usage on phones, the gender divide is even more striking; between May 2023 and November 2024, a mere 27.2% of total ChatGPT application downloads were estimated to have come from women. Claude and Perplexity ― two other popular AI models ― had similarly low buy-in from women.

Women may worry that using AI will make them look ‘less competent’

The researchers found that, in some cases, women opted out of AI because they wondered if it was ethical to use the tools.

In other instances, women worried that their skills and knowledge would be questioned if they used AI, said Rembrand Koning, one of the co-authors of the study and a Harvard Business School associate professor.

“This is speculation and something we are hoping to test in future work, but I think men don’t feel like they will be judged as ‘dumb’ if they use AI,” he told HuffPost. “A male software engineer who finds a........

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