Opinion by Jessica Stillman, Inc.
“In every industry, women are underrepresented and underpaid in leadership positions,” Reese Witherspoon said in an award acceptance speech in 2015. “That really worries me.”
Studies reveal an alarming gap in who uses and develops AI tools. Reese Witherspoon wants women to use AI more to help close it.
At the time, the Academy Award-winning actor and founder of production company Hello Sunshine was addressing the dearth of female producers and decision makers in entertainment specifically and business generally. But the world has changed a lot in 10 years. These days she’s added another worry to her list — the underrepresentation of women in AI.
“I’m always looking forward to how media is evolving and how I can help be part of bringing women along in those emerging industries. And now we’re doing it with AI. It’s so, so important that women are involved in AI,” Witherspoon told Glamour in this month’s cover interview.
AI’s Women Problem
Girl power is on brand for Witherspoon. But her latest comments aren’t just cheerleading for a bigger voice for women. Research shows she’s right to be concerned about the gender gap.
When a recent working paper examined data from 18 studies on AI usage, a stark pattern emerged. Regardless of which country or specific AI tool was considered, the numbers looked much the same. By a significant margin, most users were men. “When we aggregate them, our best estimate is that there is a 25 percent gap,” said Harvard Business School progress and paper co-author Rembrand Koning. Women made up just 42 percent of ChatGPT and Perplexity users, for example. They were just 27 percent of those downloading the ChatGPT app. Another popular model, Claude, showed an even larger gap. Just 31 percent of users are women.
“It was shocking,” Koning told the Wall Street Journal. Other data shows women make up only one-third of workers with AI skills. And Coursera data shows that just 28 percent of those enrolled in the platform’s AI training courses are women. This can’t bode well for the future of women’s advancement in an AI-saturated world. Nor is it good news for women’s ability to shape that future in a way that works for all of us. When it comes to women building rather than using AI tools, the numbers are even more dire. Fewer than a third of AI researchers are women.
“When technology is developed with just one perspective, it’s like looking at the world half-blind,” Sola Mahfouz, a quantum computing researcher at Tufts University, explained to UN Women. “More women researchers are needed in the field.”The dangers of this lack of women developing AI tools have long been clear. One 2021 study from the Berkeley Haas Center for Equity, Gender and Leadership analyzed 133 AI systems and found that 44 percent showed gender bias.
Reese Witherspoon vs. the AI Gender Gap
How can we change these depressing numbers? Experts have plenty of suggestions, from bosses creating safe spaces for all employees to experiment with AI to careful monitoring of training data for bias.
But Reese Witherspoon has a more immediate and actionable idea for individual women: Get over your hesitation and use AI more to build your skills and your ability to constructively contribute to the conversation. “I use AI everyday,” she told Glamour before listing three tools that she finds particularly useful: Perplexity for research and getting answers to specific questions. Vetted.ai for product reviews. ”If you’re buying a blender, it’ll show you six different blenders and also recommend the best product,” says Witherspoon. Simple AI as an AI assistant. “It’s an incredible tool to save time” on tasks like making appointments, says Witherspoon. AI experts agree with Witherspoon Witherspoon is just the latest hyper accomplished leader to share their personal approach to getting up to speed on AI. Bill Gates, Tim Cook, Nvidia boss Jensen Huang, and OpenAI president Greg Brockman have all shared their approaches.
Each of these billionaires agrees with Witherspoon about the importance of pushing past your fears and just getting started. Ever-colorful Mark Cuban has even gone so far as to saythat, if you’re not playing around with AI, “you’re f***ed.” But while many of these famous AI boosters personally benefit from greater AI adoption, Witherspoon’s angle is different. She’s not telling women to start using AI because it will make her money, or even just to make sure they keep pace in their careers (though that’s an important point). Witherspoon’s motivation is making sure women not only benefit from these new AI tools, but also have the knowledge and experience to earn a seat at the tables at which decisions are made. That way they can shape how they’re developed and deployed.
Given the current gender gap in AI that’s something we should all be mindful of.
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