Women are lagging behind on AI but they can catch up

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

The writer is FT Working It editor and author of ‘The Future-Proof Career’

Women are more likely than men to be in jobs at risk of being automated, but are also 25 per cent less likely than men to have basic digital skills, separate studies show.

The findings, from the International Labour Organization and the UN respectively, highlight an urgent challenge for women across the world. The artificial intelligence-driven industrial revolution ought to offer a unique opportunity for everyone to shape the future of work, but many women are already behind.

A 2024 Danish study of 100,000 workers found “a staggering gender gap in the adoption of [OpenAI chatbot] ChatGPT: women are 20 percentage points less likely to use ChatGPT than men in the same occupation”. The researchers found the gap persisted when people in the same workplaces were compared, and when the study controlled for different task mixes.

So how can women keep up with AI developments — especially those who might feel too busy to take time off for training within a part-time schedule, or who may be in denial about AI’s all-consuming importance? The challenges are understandable: it is hard to know where to start.

A useful resource is research company Charter’s Guide to AI in the Workplace. Instead of focusing on ideas and AI’s “maybe” impacts, this report has case studies on how some prominent companies are working with staff to share AI best practice.

But small employers don’t have anything like these resources and, as the UK’s Pissarides Review into the future of work and wellbeing points out, “good impacts — including upskilling and the substitution of routine tasks — cannot be assumed and must be proactively shaped”.

So how can you use AI yourself, even when there is no corporate, or even team-level, push for change? The best advice I have seen is from Slack, the workplace collaboration platform, which recommends setting aside time for experimentation and learning.

It is also good to be curious about AI, more generally. My recent reading includes “AI will change what it is to be human. Are we ready?” by economist Tyler Cowen and Avital Balwit, of AI software developer Anthropic.

I am also experimenting. I asked the FT’s ChatGPT Enterprise to tell me what is holding women back in adopting AI. It pointed to a 2024 study on women and generative AI by Deloitte, the consultancy. The researchers expected “the proportion of women experimenting with and using gen AI for projects and tasks will match or surpass that of men in the United States by the end of 2025”. So it is not all doom and gloom.

Caution is still good. As the FT noted last month, generative AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude may sometimes demonstrate how “the potential biases of those working at AI companies can seep into their models”. An FT reporter ran a series of questions about AI bosses through different chatbots, and each model was far more favourable about its own leader.

The proportion of US women using or experimenting with AI is expected to surpass men by 2025

Women make up just a third of the AI workforce, according to World Economic Forum figures. But that should give us all the more reason to learn more about large language models and AI-powered agents — and start to influence how to build knowledge in our own organisations.

You will know the saying that “AI is not going to take your job — someone using AI will”. That sounds reassuring for anyone who has mastered AI and validates those who are experimenting.

Unfortunately, like many things in the AI-spin cycle, even this idea may be outdated. Sangeet Paul Choudary, a tech author and adviser, says this idea is “true, but utterly useless”. In his Substack newsletter, he says the statement “directs your attention to the individual task level — automation vs augmentation of the tasks you perform — when the real shift is happening at the level of the entire system of work”. That difference takes some processing but is a useful way to see the bigger picture.

If you have yet to use generative AI, don’t panic. Time is on your side. Consultancy McKinsey has found that, despite the hype, only 1 per cent of leaders say their companies are “mature” on AI deployment. The other 99 per cent? That’s where the rest of us work.