Women Are Afraid to Use AI at Work. Here's What That Fear Is Protecting.

Sep 22

7 min read

Woman hesitating to use AI at work, glancing toward the office door.

Erica Anderson Rooney is an ex-CPO turned executive coach and AI educator on a mission to get more women into positions of power and keep them there. She is the author of The AI Gap (2026), host of the Glass Ceilings & Sticky Floors and AI Voice or Victim podcasts, and NC Chapter Lead for Women Applying AI. Her SNAP and AI Continuum frameworks are taught to thousands of women through CHIEF, WICT, and Fortune 500 leadership programs. She is the sought-after speaker at the intersection of women, AI, and leadership.

"Women need to be using this tool, period." That is what my friend Meg Pierce said to me mid-conversation. Then she named the reason so many of them are not. Women are afraid to use AI at work for fear of getting in trouble. Someone is going to come for me for breaking the rule of using this tool.

Sit with that for a second. She did not say women do not understand it, or have not gotten around to it. She said they are afraid of getting in trouble.

And that fear has a basis. Lean In's 2026 research found men use AI daily at work at a rate 22% higher than women, and women are 32% more likely to worry they will be seen as

cheating when they use it. Women who hesitate have read the room correctly. The rules are applied unevenly, and they can feel it.

Meghan Pierce is President and CEO of The Forum of Executive Women, Philadelphia's premier professional women's organization, founded in 1977. When we got to talking about AI, it became clear this is the same gap her organization has always tracked in pay and leadership, showing up faster and with higher stakes, because AI moves faster than a fiscal year ever did.

That is exactly why I built The AI Gap around four parts, and why I want to walk through all four today using Meg's perspective and mine.

Awareness: You Are Not Imagining the Double Standard

Women who use AI at work get judged more harshly for it than men do. Lean In found that among people who have used AI on the job, men were more likely to be praised for it, and more likely to be encouraged by their managers to use it in the first place. So men build the skill faster, which sets them further ahead while women are still deciding whether it is even safe to try.

The guilt on top of that is real too. A huge number of the women I coach describe using AI as feeling like cheating, like they are getting away with something. I ask them the same thing every time. Did you feel like you were cheating the day you traded a horse and buggy for a car? Nobody apologizes for using electricity. Nobody opens a meeting with "I used email today, isn't that impressive." AI is becoming exactly that kind of everyday technology, and the guilt women carry about it is a symptom of the double standard.

Here is why Awareness comes first. Until you see the fear as something done to you from the outside, you spend your energy managing your own guilt instead of building the skill. Meg told me she sees the same pattern with imposter syndrome among the executive women in her network, women who are more than qualified and still convinced they do not belong in the room. A guest I had on a few weeks back, Siri Swahari, said something I have not stopped repeating since. She hopes everybody experiences imposter syndrome, because it means you are about to step into something great. That reframe changes what the fear is for. It becomes a signal that you are at the edge of your next level, whether the room is a boardroom or a blank AI prompt box.

Woman thinking through her hesitation about using AI at work.

Authority: Who Is in the Room Building This

When I was writing my book, I looked at the C-suite leadership of every major AI company, places like Anthropic and OpenAI. Zero women. At the very last second before publication, my editor found one, and I updated the line. One.

That is representation, and representation determines whether a system understands a woman's life at all. I ran an experiment with a room full of highly technical, deeply AI-literate women, the kind who use these tools daily and more intricately than most of us ever will. We asked ChatGPT to generate an image of what it thought each of us looked like, based on everything it knew about us. Almost every one of them got back a picture of an old, pale, stale white man. One woman finally generated an image of herself, and behind her in the picture was a quote wrongly attributed to Ruth Bader Ginsburg. That is what gets baked into a system when the room that built it looked like that.

Meg sees the same pattern in leadership more broadly. She told me that last year, Philadelphia had nine women CEOs out of its top 100 publicly traded companies. Nine. And that was the best year the region has ever had. AI leadership is repeating that exact pattern, younger and faster, which gives us a narrower window to fix it before it hardens into the next fifty years of who gets to shape the tools.

Authority means using the tool, and it also means having a say in what the tool assumes is normal. Right now that decision is being made almost entirely without us.

Women reviewing a report together at a conference table.

Compounding: The Skills Gap Widens Every Day You Wait

Here is the part that should create urgency instead of guilt. Early adopters gain skill velocity. Skill velocity increases visibility. Visibility drives promotion. Promotion drives pay.

Every week a woman avoids AI because she is worried about getting caught, a man three desks over is compounding a skill advantage that will show up in his next performance review, his next promotion, his next negotiation. It is the same mechanism behind the pay gap Meg's organization has spent decades working on. A pattern that took years to show up in salary data can now show up in months, because the AI loop moves so much faster.

Meg named something else that compounds the same way: sponsorship. A mentor gives advice. A sponsor says your name in rooms you are not in yet. The catch is that sponsors find you. You earn a sponsor by doing work someone wants to attach their name to, and AI skill is becoming exactly that kind of visible work. The woman who can walk into a room and show what the tool can do for her team is the one a sponsor wants standing next to them. The woman hiding her AI use out of guilt is invisible to the exact people who could pull her forward.

The AI gap between a woman presenting with AI and an empty seat.

Leadership: Decide What You Are Allowed to Build

The women I admire most right now feel the fear about AI and use the tool anyway, deliberately, out loud, without apologizing for it.

Leadership here has nothing to do with becoming a machine learning engineer. It means deciding you are allowed to be in the room where this gets shaped, the same way you decided you were allowed to ask for the promotion or the seat at the table. When I asked Meg what advice she would give her younger self, back when she first stepped into leading a room full of accomplished women despite her own imposter syndrome, she kept it simple. You have everything you need right now. I would add one thing. What is meant for you will not miss you.

History is written in the training data. If women are not shaping the inputs, we will be living with someone else's outputs. Meg is already watching it happen to the entry-level women trying to break into the workforce today, who are feeling the squeeze first from the same technology the rest of us are still deciding whether to touch.

What I Want You to Take From This

The fear you feel about using AI at work is proof you have noticed the rules are applied unevenly. Use the tool anyway. Every day you wait is a day someone else compounds an advantage you could be building, and every day you use it out loud is a day you make it a little safer for the next woman to do the same.

If you want to hear the full conversation, Meg and I got into the pay gap data by race and industry, why sponsors have to find you, and what it will take to get more women into the boardrooms making these decisions.

This is the work I wrote The AI Gap to start, and exactly what we work through together inside HER Collective, so the women who show up now are the ones who close the gap first. We saved you a seat.

Woman closing her laptop, satisfied after using AI at work.

I am cheering you on.

Erica

Frequently Asked Questions

What is The AI Gap?

The AI Gap is Erica Anderson Rooney's framework and 2026 book on the growing distance between the people shaping AI systems and the people being shaped by them. It breaks the problem into four parts: Awareness of the double standards women face using AI, Authority over who is represented in how these systems are built, Compounding of skill and visibility over time, and Leadership in deciding what women are allowed to build going forward.

Why are women less likely to use AI at work than men?

Lean In's 2026 research found men use AI daily at work at a rate 22% higher than women, and women are 32% more likely to worry they will be seen as cheating when they use it. Women also get less manager encouragement and less praise for using AI, which makes hesitation a reasonable response to a real double standard.

Does AI bias show up in a noticeable way for women?

Yes. When a group of highly AI-literate women asked ChatGPT to generate an image of what it thought they looked like, based on everything it knew about them, almost all of them received images of white men. It reflects how underrepresented women are in the data and the leadership shaping these systems.