A few days ago, a keynote speaker and futurist shared a reel put together by one of his speaking agencies, advertising their current slate of AI speakers. Pretty standard fare, but as I watched, I noticed that there was only one woman in the entire video. As sad as this is, it doesn't come as a complete surprise -- while the numbers vary, a wide range of reporting puts the numbers of women using AI on a regular basis far behind men. According to the Economist, women use ChatGPT between 16 and 20 percentage points less than their male peers, even when they are employed in the same jobs or read the same subject.
This is a huge issue for many reasons, including the fact that AI will touch basically every career to some extent in the next few years and that women can uniquely benefit from adopting AI. Over the course of the next several issues, I'll dive deep into why women should be using AI more, and what AI products and services can and should be built to support women.
A note on some terms and assumptions: in many cases, these benefits will be discussed in the context of women who have the primary caregiving responsibility. This is not to say single dads, same sex couples, and single folks cannot benefit from many of these applications; this is only to say that, even in 2025, women still shoulder the burdens of a lot of household management and caregiving. This is also not meant to devalue that work; merely to offer options and alternatives for those who want them. If planning costumes for school spirit days or managing appointments is your jam, do you!
In the spirit of offering alternatives, I want to dive into the first place AI can benefit women -- helping them make decisions about whether to stay in the paid workforce once they become parents. In the United States, many families are faced with extremely high childcare costs, and many women look at their current salaries versus the cost of childcare and decide to leave the paid labor force.
Unfortunately, this decision is often based on incomplete and asymmetric information. For instance, just because your salary is X at age 30, that doesn't mean it will stay at that number forever. Likewise, if you work for a place with retirement benefits or 401k matching, that money is often not factored into the equation. There is also the issue of losing out on promotions and visibility in your industry, which of course varies from job to job.
Imagine if an AI app existed where someone could plug in all their current information and it would run a deep analysis of all the data about promotions, salary growth over time, and retirement savings, and come up with a cost for every year someone was out of the labor force. That cost could then be weighed against childcare costs and other relevant factors. People could go into the process of making this decision with all the facts and make it with a clear head.
And plenty of women (and some men) would still decide that leaving the paid labor force is what they want, for whatever reasons, and that's totally legitimate. But at least they would be making an informed choice armed with all the data, and be able to prepare for whatever the financial implications of the decision are. This type of transparency could also lead employers to provide better benefits for parents as a competitive advantage, so that they can recruit and retain talent.
This is just one example of how the smart use of AI can benefit women. In the coming weeks, I'll be writing about household labor, emotional labor, how AI can benefit parents, and how AI can help women negotiate better. If there are other topics you're curious about, let me know. This will also turn into a longer article and a keynote, so if you want to do your part and book more female AI speakers, let me know.