Back in 2021, Deloitte’s landmark study of 5,000 U.S. employees found something striking: women and men start their careers trusting their employers roughly equally, but that trust diverges fast. By the time women reach the director level, they report trusting their employer 30% less than their male peers at the same rank. Four years on, a similar pattern is emerging in how women and men relate to a new workplace force: artificial intelligence.
What the newer data shows
The gap isn’t subtle. A 2024 Federal Reserve Bank of New York survey found that half of men had used generative AI in the past year, compared with about a third of women. Harvard Business School researchers who pooled 18 studies covering more than 140,000 workers and students put the aggregate adoption gap at around 25%, with women 10–40% less likely to use AI tools depending on the study. Global web traffic data tells the same story: the gap is largest specifically for the most powerful, “frontier” AI tools, the ones most likely to shape careers and pay.
Attitudes track adoption. A 2025 Pew Research study found women are twice as likely as men to say they feel concerned rather than excited about AI in daily life. CNBC’s 2026 SurveyMonkey Women at Work survey found 69% of men call AI a valuable collaborator, versus 61% of women, and half of women said using AI at work “feels like cheating,” compared with 43% of men. Even in Anthropic’s own user base, women made up just 38% of Claude users as of April 2025.
Researchers point to specific, trust-shaped reasons: opacity around how AI models actually work, worry about “unintended medical harm” or “inappropriate data sharing” in earlier surveys, and, echoing Deloitte’s original finding, a broader skepticism toward employer-driven technology that women have already learned, often for good reason, to be cautious about.
Their concerns are not unfounded. When women use AI they are judged more harshly than their male counterparts. Specifically, the technology is weaponised to target and harass women and girls at unprecedented levels.
A more positive outlook
Happily, it’s not all one direction. Deloitte’s 2024 research found women’s generative AI adoption nearly tripled in a single year, growing faster than men’s, and some researchers projected the gap could close by the end of 2025. However, the Carnegie Endowment’s 2025 California survey suggests that closing is taking longer than hoped, with the relative gap stabilizing around 16%. Notably, one Boston Consulting Group survey of San Francisco tech workers found women were slightly more likely than men to use AI, suggesting exposure and workplace culture, not gender itself, may be the real driver.
That reframes the story: this may be less a permanent trust deficit and more a solvable access-and-onboarding problem with tech companies demonstrating that they are managing algorithmic bias and harassment using AI tools such as smart eyewear and allowing the posting of non-consensual images.
Why the need for transparency is important
If frontier AI tools become the new baseline for productivity and promotion, an adoption and trust gap risks also becoming a pay and advancement gap. This echoes exactly the dynamic Deloitte flagged in 2021, just with a new mechanism.
Closing it will likely take the same fix as any trust gap: transparency, hands-on exposure, and workplaces that earn confidence rather than assume it.
Where is AI affecting trust in your organisation? Talk to 3Plus about an inclusive AI/DEI review
