On women and the pressure to navigate a male-centric economy despite the glaring ethical concerns AI raises
A few weeks ago, actress Reese Witherspoon posted an Instagram Reel encouraging her female audience to learn the basics and tools of artificial intelligence (AI), negatively citing the fact that seven out of 10 women in her book club did not use AI. In her caption, she wrote:
“FYI: the jobs women hold are 3x more likely to be automated by AI, yet women are using AI at a rate 25% lower than men on average.”
Witherspoon’s comments sparked major backlash, with many people in the comment section speculating that the video was an undisclosed ad.
Mel Cassell is a 20-year-old video editor and musician. She could see why people thought it was an ad due to Witherspoon’s tone and messaging.
“I don’t think that scaring women into feeling like they will be left behind unless they use [AI] is very good or honest,” Cassell said, “and I think that’s part of why a lot of people watching that reel thought that she might have been paid to make it.”
The negative speculation was so great that Witherspoon posted an Instagram story following the backlash, saying that no one was paying her to talk about AI, according to Chris Gardner from the Hollywood Reporter.
Witherspoon is not the only celebrity encouraging others to use AI. Sandra Bullock said we have to “make it our friend,” at CNBC’s Changemakers event. Other Hollywood stars are also in support of AI, with Ben Affleck selling his AI startup company to Netflix, and both Matthew McConaughey and Michael Caine have taken steps to trademark their voice and likeness to profit off AI companies.
This 25% statistic Witherspoon mentioned refers to a study from the Harvard Business School that came out last year. According to the study, there is a significant gender gap in the AI usage of men and women:
“Women made up only 42% of the roughly 200 million average monthly users who engaged with the ChatGPT website, 42.4% of Perplexity users, and just 31.2% of Anthropic users across the world,” the study writes.
Rembrand M. Koning, the Mary V. and Mark A. Stevens Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard and one of the main researchers behind the study, said in a Harvard Business School article that women not adopting AI at the rate that men are is concerning.
Koning said the research suggests women are more wary of using generative AI for ethical reasons. Despite this, he encourages women to ignore those concerns and use AI. Otherwise, women may struggle to advance in their careers, AI could miss out on input from women, which would further the gender bias in AI technology, and business overall could lose out on potential growth.
What these narratives and motives have in common is that they tell women that if they do not adapt and catch up to the trendy, new technology that the men are doing, they are economically doomed. Women will be left behind.
Let’s break down the three points made by not only Koning and Michael Blanding, the author of the article, but a lot of Hollywood:
Women may struggle to advance in their careers
This is the major scare tactic used by people in positions of power and influence when speaking in support of women’s AI usage. While the comments on Witherspoon’s reel were overwhelmingly negative, others believe that AI is an inevitability that society has to learn to work with.
Jannine Eckle, a digital marketing student, is the vice president of the DePaul AI club. The club is a collaborative space where students, whether they are pro- or anti-AI, can respectfully discuss their views on the technology, as well as become educated on the many uses of AI.
“Our mindset is, we know that it exists,” Eckle said. “We know that it’s very likely not going anywhere, so how can we work alongside it? How can we incorporate it where necessary, and how can we push against it where it’s not necessary?”
Eckle is a digital marketing intern at Elevate Healing Arts, and she completed another internship at Wuensche, a German product development company. At those jobs, her manual tasks included market research, product inspection and content creation. In the near future, she doesn’t foresee AI being a threat to her job security.
“I think humans know what humans want at the end of the day,” Eckle said.
Despite some people’s more tolerant views of AI, others echo the sentiments of the pissed off comments under Witherspoon’s reel.
Samantha Close is a communications professor at DePaul. Her research primarily focuses on labor and transforming models of creative industries. She believes the “left behind” narrative is buying into undeserved hype and that the tech industry has always found ways to tell women that they’re less technologically advanced than their male counterparts.
“Even as women were some of the first users of personal computers, we don’t remember that nowadays,” Close said. “We remember men were the first users of personal computers; women were behind.”
Close believes that people who are pro- vs. anti-AI is an industry divide above anything else. People in creative and humanities-based industries are more likely to be anti-AI, whereas tech and business spaces are more likely to be pro-AI.
As a student at the business school, many of Eckle’s professors have been pro-AI.
“They always say, ‘It’s not AI that’s going to take your job,” Eckle said. “It’s someone that knows how to work AI better than you that’s going to take your job.”
According to Close, this narrative doesn’t really benefit women, but the industries that want women to conform in order to make them more money.
“Why aren’t we saying that men are going too fast in embracing this technology that has unknown risks and known environmental consequences? Why isn’t that the narrative?”
Close and Cassell both believe that women use AI less because of the ethical consequences. Cassell suggested that the seven out of 10 women in Witherspoon’s book club don’t use AI not because they are misinformed, but because they are well informed about the consequences.
“I think that they might have other reservations like the climate, or the fact that it steals everything from everybody, or not liking CEOs of AI companies like Sam Altman or Elon Musk,” Cassell said. “Or, if they’re in a book club, they might very much value quality writing.”
AI has drastic impacts on the environment. The raw materials used to power AI are mined in the most politically unstable regions, creating sacrifice zones. AI produces electronic waste containing mercury and lead, and data centers may soon need six times more water in cooling than the country of Denmark. Even as someone who is more tolerant of AI, like Eckle, her first instinct is to not reach for AI where she feels it isn’t entirely necessary. She is passionate about environmental sustainability, as she buys secondhand clothes and furniture.
“I don’t suddenly want to turn away from sustainability because AI is so convenient and useful,” Eckle said.
However, what defines ethical versus non-ethical use of AI? The line between the two continues to remain very blurred. Anushka Dabhade, a masters student in writing and publishing at DePaul, is the director of education for the AI club. She is a fish out of water in her anti-AI cohort of classmates and uses AI tools to help her book writing process. She thinks that, if used ethically, AI can be a great time-saver.
“I read that [F. Scott] Fitzgerald, the writer of The Great Gatsby, used to make his own paintings of the characters he would create. He painted Great Gatsby, and then he wrote the actual stuff about him, so that he knows the character is [visually] consistent throughout the whole book, and that’s something I tried,” Dabhade said. “There was this AI tool called Ideogram. You tell [it] what kind of character you want and it creates a picture of the character, and that was really helpful for me.”
For Dabhade, she believes it is unethical to make AI write and publish a whole book, but if a self-published author wanted to market their book online and doesn’t have the means to hire a marketing team, she thinks that is okay.
“[It] is a nice tool if you do not have a team,” Dabhade said.
Others may feel that not hiring a marketing specialist is taking away a job from a real person, which could also be seen as unethical. Given how new the technology is, the ethics still remain a gray area, and different lines are drawn for different people.
AI will miss out on input from women
Koning and Blanding expressed concerns that Large Language Models (LLMs), like the text-based model ChatGPT, could progress without a woman’s perspective as AI continues to develop. They argue that this will reinforce stereotypes against women and keep them disproportionately earning less.
Generative AI is already known to have a clear gender bias, according to a study in May 2025 published in Computers in Human Behavior: Artificial Humans. But Koning wants women to look past AI’s misogyny and use it anyway to negate bias in the future.
Cassell thinks women don’t use AI as much because the marketing of AI is very “man-centric.”
“A lot of AI ads are focused on AI companions that a lot of women don’t really need,” Cassell said.
There has also been an increase in AI deepfakes of non-consensual, sexually explicit images of young girls, which Elon Musk’s company Grok has been investigated by the EU for.
“A lot of the crisis around deepfakes that we’re seeing is in high schools, and that would have been every easy to think about and to say, ‘We can’t release this product until we know it’s not going to make naked images of children,’ and [AI companies] didn’t even do that much,” Close said.
Not to mention that the CEO of Palantir, Alex Carp, has directly stated that “this technology disrupts humanities-trained – largely Democratic – voters, and makes their economic power less. And increases the economic power of vocationally trained, working-class, often male … voters.” Not exactly the greatest marketing tactic for women to feel included in this new technology.
Eckle said ChatGPT donates a lot of money to President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly gone after women’s reproductive rights and rolled back DEI protections. The most benefitted group from DEI is white women. In her experience, more women than men tend to lean left, so the gender divide could also be explained politically.
Furthermore, a lot of the AI companion voices — Siri, Alexa, Claude — they’re all female. Eckle wonders that maybe AI is appealing to men in that way because they’re used to delegating tedious tasks to women.
“Now [men] can just ask an AI and it’ll do the work for them,” Eckle said. “And that’s essentially the equivalent of pushing that task off to someone who you feel is worth less than you.”
For Dabhade, she was surprised that AI is being less used by women, as many women in her own life use AI as their personal therapist and even use the popular character.ai tool to talk to fictional characters. She even knows a 30-year-old woman who believes she is married to and has kids with an AI chatbot who resembles Alex Volkov from Twisted Love, a dark romance book.
According to Dabhade, the woman told her therapist that she was “falling in love with this random fictional thing that [she’s] just talking to, and the therapist tried to help her, but then she fell so much in love with this bot, that it was inevitable and she kind of married him.”
While this particular woman was falling in love with an AI bot, women are more likely to be the target of deepfakes than men. A man from Columbus, Ohio, is believed to be the first person in the U.S. convicted of using AI-generated, sexually explicit images of women. The victims of Musk’s lawsuit were overwhelmingly women and young girls.
Despite all of these ways that AI has ousted and othered women, Close believes celebrities like Witherspoon are pandering to this historical narrative of telling women to “work harder” instead of creating a space where women can feel valued in their contributions.
“Sheryl Sandberg became famous for that book Lean In that suggested that all women needed to do was work harder and assert themselves more,” Close said. “And I think [the narrative] shares a lot with that and is problematic in exactly the same way.”
Businesses and the economy might lose potential growth
Blanding’s primary reason listed for women not using AI as much as men is that “businesses could miss out on major productivity gains” which “could widen the persistent gender gap in wages and career opportunities.”
Despite whether women use AI or not, there isn’t really a massive learning curve in using AI. It isn’t like having to learn how to use a computer, or physically program anything; it’s just about plugging questions into a chatbot. Which raises the question — what skill set are women really missing out on?
In response to this question, Eckle said the argument that women will be left behind made a lot less sense. Confused, she answered, “One of my assignments was to do a course on AI, and it would essentially teach you how to prompt better and get better results with AI, I don’t know, so I guess that’s where the argument comes from.”
For Cassell, she thinks “there’s not really any reason that people wouldn’t adopt AI other than moral and climate reservations.”
Close encourages people to think critically about who is gaining from telling women to use generative AI, which in her opinion, are tech industries and businesses, not artists, workers and creatives. She cites the launch and cancellation of Sora, OpenAI’s video generation platform, as a good example of how AI companies “don’t know what they’re doing.”
“There isn’t a solid revenue model around any of this, and yet we’re being asked to completely redesign society around this technology to benefit the people who own it,” Close said. “And I think that we need to resist that.”
This uncertainty is reflected in not only Sora, but also companies like Deloitte losing money because of inaccurate consultancy reports that included AI content riddled with errors.
Whether they embrace AI or not, women lose either way
Cassell thinks it’s disingenuous that Witherspoon posted this video in the midst of another writers strike in Hollywood, where many creatives, including women, are struggling to be paid fairly for their work.
“I don’t like to think negatively of people, I like to think that she probably had good intentions, but this is not a good time to be talking about that.”
The Economic Policy Institute reported that the gender wage gap has slightly widened in the midst of Trump’s presidency. In 2025, women across all varying levels of education, race, state and marital status made 18.6% less than men, whereas in 2024, the gap was 18%.
Eckle said “nothing is ever handed to a woman,” and regardless of AI being a helpful tool or another hurdle that women have to jump over in a man’s world, women would still be at a disadvantage in the workforce either way.
“Even if we do embrace AI, nothing really changes. I feel like we would still be in a position where we would need to think more, differently and more creatively, just to stand out amongst the men that we do work with,” Eckle said.
Header Image by Annie Price
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