The AI gender gap: Why women are more skeptical about AI than men

• There's a gap in how men and women perceive AI, a new poll found.
• Women are more skeptical of AI regulation and more weary of letting their kids use the technology.

Men and women are taking different approaches to artificial intelligence, a new poll found.

In October, data intelligence firm Morning Consult partnered with Axios to survey 2,203 US adults to understand how Americans across various demographics feel about AI.

The findings seem to suggest that men are more comfortable embracing AI than women are.

Forty-four percent of women surveyed said it's impossible to regulate the technology, compared to only 23% of men.

The gender discrepancy is even wider when it comes to parenting. While 31% of men surveyed said they would let their kids use AI chatbots, like OpenAI's ChatGPT, "for any purpose," only 4% of women said they would. In fact, 53% of women surveyed said they would ban their kids from using AI altogether, compared to 26% of men.

Women may have more concerns about AI than men in part because initial users of AI tend to be men under the age of 35, Jordan Marlatt, Morning Consult's tech analyst, said.

"We find in our research that people who consider themselves to be among the first to buy new technologies — early tech adopters — are more likely to be men and millennials," Marlatt told Insider over email.

"We see this reflected in the levels of interest people have in various applications of AI, the share who say they have already used these tools, and those who have a more positive outlook on the technology's societal impact," he said.

The findings on the AI gender gap is an addition to a growing body of research that suggests that the AI revolution will affect men and women differently.

An August study by the International Labour Organization found that women are more likely to hold jobs that have the potential to be automated. A similar analysis published by the Pew Research Center in July found that a greater share of women have roles that may be replaced or assisted by AI.

The gender gap also affects women already in the AI world: AI startups in the UK founded by women raised six times less than those founded by men over the last 10 years.

"This recent explosion in investment in generative AI has made the need for women and marginalized groups to have an equal place in tech entrepreneurship and the VC ecosystem much more urgent," Erin Young, a researcher at the Turing Institute, previously told Insider.

Still, some women are finding ways to cash in on the AI hype.

Jacqueline DeStefano-Tangorra, the founder of consulting firm Omni Business Intelligence Solutions, said that using ChatGPT to automate parts of her job helped her land $128,000 worth of new contracts in just three months. Nicole Cueto, a public relations consultant, said she uses ChatGPT to support her side hustle by cutting her research time in half.