08 March,2026 08:41 AM IST | Mumbai | Akshita Maheshwari
Namaah Kumar believes that women are more wary of AI because of its likely misuse, like in the case of Grok making sexually explicit deepfakes
Dr Bharti, an alumna of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences and a research consultant says, "I use AI primarily for grammar checks and to refine my writing. However, I don't rely on AI-generated analysis of my data. The interpretation of the data must come from my own understanding and engagement with it."
Dr Nisha Bharti starts feeling guilty when she uses AI to do her work
"While using ChatGPT, I start judging myself. I think to myself, âI do not know this and ChatGPT is doing this for me.'Even when you submit the work to your employer, you feel shame for taking help from AI," she says. This tracks with the Harvard research, which suggests that women are more concerned about the ethics of using the tools and fear they may be judged in the workplace for relying on them.
Namaah Kumar, a 34-year-old creative director, uses AI to help with work. She argues that the primary reason for fewer women using AI is the fact that there are more men in the workforce than women, specifically industries that entail the use of generative AI. Government data shows that in India, male participation is around 77 per cent, compared to approximately 33 per cent for women as of 2024-2025.
The deeper argument, however, is this: "Today, AI is at such a nascent stage that most of us are just playing around with it, to see what sticks and what doesn't. Men have the free time and less to lose to tinker around, which women simply don't have," she says. Women do more unpaid labour (housework, caregiving, emotional labour). Because of that, men are more likely to have unstructured time to explore hobbies, experiment, and "tinker". That extra leisure time historically helped men dominate early computing, gaming, and tech hobbyist cultures.
If women do not adapt to AI, experts fear that the already existing gender pay gap might widen. PIC/ISTOCK
There's also the age-old argument that women are risk averse. "We [women] are a little more sceptical about new technologies. Of course, we take to it like fish to water when we start. But we wait for it to gain some critical mass before diving in." And women are not wrong to wait, "especially after seeing what's been happening with Grok," says Kumar, referring to X's AI chatbot, which was found generating non-consensual sexually explicit deepfakes of women and minors.
She recounts, "In the early days of Facebook, women wouldn't put their own pictures as profile pictures so they don't get misused. Women are generally a little more wary of this because we have more to lose."
AI ethicist Dr Sundaraparipurnan Narayanan argues that the AI gender gap is a reflection of lesser participation of women in the workplace. "That's a decades-old problem we have not been able to solve," he says. But, if the trend continues, it will only edge women further out of the workforce, he warns. "In, say, 10 to 15 years from now, that gap would basically define haves and have-nots. If a man uses 10 AI tools to build his capability, but a woman is not leveraging those tools, a recruiter will see one as more capable and the other as less capable."
Dr Sundaraparipurnan Narayanan
He further adds, building good AI is impossible without women. "People may generalise and say that everybody has empathy - yes. But if you have seen women all through your life, you will invariably agree that empathy is incredibly high in them," he says. AI is in a constant feedback loop with its users and it evolves alongside them. If more women interact with AI, the assumption is that it will evolve with more empathy. "You do not want an AI system which is only focused on performance and progress. The way I see it is that women are trained towards multitasking and problem-solving with empathy. Now, this is a skill that is integral for how AI evolves tomorrow."
