Recently, a woman I have worked with in the past said that generational attitudes towards AI makes a huge difference in their expectations and experience with it. L's theory is that young people want to let AI do it all for them if possible, free up their time. It is yet to be determined what the person will do with all the time they've freed up but that is an easy solve.
Older people have spent decades learning skills and trades that they take pride in and therefore resist AI as way to boost their productivity - it minimizes their effort in achieving mastery, makes a mockery of it it even. That seems to make sense and squares with what both see around us. L is about my age and an early adopter of GenAI and is using it to do more in the same amount of time. She is an outlier and not part of the AI adoption gender-gap. I am not quite at L's level of usage but very far from sitting it out - there is a lot of room for improvement and optimization.
I did not ask L her option on the drivers for the AI adoption gap. The third possibility cited in the article seems closest to what I have seen around me:
A third possibility is something about guilt—that women may feel like it’s cheating to use ChatGPT. If I am a lawyer or an accountant or professor or a doctor, and I have to write a note for my patients or a note to my students, maybe it feels a little bit like cheating to rely on ChatGPT. Maybe this is something that women are more susceptible to than men.
Men are happy to discuss publicly how they are using the technology to help with their job but I have never heard a woman join in that conversation. Since it is not the norm if there are women like L (or even me) who do use it, we understand that the social norm is to not be too public about it. That is atleast true for my age bracket. Could be different from younger women though have not seen that to be the case in my experience.
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