Study Finds AI Agents Face Gender-Based Pay Bias
Researchers found that people give female-presenting AI agents significantly lower monetary rewards than male-presenting agents for identical work.
Researchers from the University of Limerick, University of Zurich, and SKEMA Business School discovered that human gender bias is replicated in interactions with artificial intelligence. In a virtual reality office experiment involving 189 participants, a female-presenting AI agent named Johanna received 10.25% less monetary reward than a male-presenting AI agent named Johan for completing the same work.
Both agents utilized identical underlying technology and capabilities. The study revealed a gap between participant testimony and behavior; while most participants claimed AI gender was irrelevant and expressed a preference for non-human systems, their financial decisions favored male-presenting agents. Participants also demonstrated higher trust in human-like AI compared to desk robots, despite the shared technology.
Presented at the 14th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, the findings suggest that design choices regarding AI appearance and gender can activate existing social inequalities. Mary Hausfeld, a study co-author, noted that the way these systems are presented can trigger the same assumptions and biases found in human interactions.
