Technology

Battle Of Sexes Hits AI As Wall Street Giant Finds Whopping 31-Point Gender Gap

Wikimedia Commons/Public/Jernej Furman from Slovenia, CC BY 2.0

Women are souring on artificial intelligence while men remain upbeat, a new survey found.

A 31-point gender gap separated how American men and women viewed AI in late September, according to a Morgan Stanley survey of 2,000 consumers first reported by Axios on Thursday. Women with negative views were more likely than men to cite concerns about nearby data centers and AI progressing too quickly.

“We cannot let the AI gender gap become an entrenched chasm,” Bridget Griswold, CEO of LeanIn, told Axios.

Morgan Stanley asked respondents whether their overall view of AI was positive or negative and then subtracted the negative share from the positive share to measure net sentiment on the technology, Axios reported. The bank has run the study since April. 

Men came in at positive 30 percent, while women landed at negative one percent, according to Axios. Women’s sentiment has slipped from positive six percent in April, while men’s has held roughly steady.

Among respondents with negative views, women, at 44 percent, were more likely than men, at 36 percent, to say, “I do not want a data center built near my home,” Axios reported.

Meanwhile, women were three percentage points more likely than men to respond that they disliked AI on the premise that “it is developing too quickly without enough safeguards,” according to Axios.

Morgan Stanley and Lean In did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

Other polling found the same split.

Some 33 percent of women expected AI to harm them personally over the next two decades, while 17 percent expected it to help, a June 17 Pew Research Center study found.

“Across our surveys, there’s a consistent pattern where women tend to view AI more negatively than men,” Pew stated in the report.

The split on AI was highlighted at a Sept. 26 pro-data center party in Washington, D.C., where an attendee told The Washington Sun that men outnumbered women “[l]ike, four or five to one.” Three of the four protesters at the party were women.

“We’ve been really kind of in despair over seeing how [AI is] maybe going to put us out of our jobs,” Grace Plihal, one of the protesters, told the Washington Sun.

A group behind the party pushed back on the attendee’s gender-ratio estimate.

“The ladies who attended our Data After Dark party beg to differ,” Young Voices said in response to the comment in a Sept. 29 X post, including pictures of several women at the party that took place days earlier.