Wage Against the Machine
It seems like AI is taking over many tasks, but one area where it still lags is in addressing workplace bias. A revealing study discovered that female-presenting AI agents received notably lower pay compared to their male counterparts for doing the same job.
“The technology behind these AI agents was exactly the same, but people didn’t engage with them in the same way,” said Dr. Mary Hausfeld, the lead researcher from the University of Limerick’s Kemmy Business School in Ireland.
Dr. Hausfeld and her team set out to investigate how the appearance of AI assistants influences human interaction within professional environments. With AI becoming more prevalent across various fields, including healthcare, education, and recruitment, the impact of its presentation warrants careful consideration.
“As AI agents become increasingly integrated into the workplace, it’s crucial to reflect on the features we assign them and the behaviors those choices might foster,” Dr. Hausfeld noted.
The findings, published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior, extend a previous study which indicated that human-like AI is often viewed as more credible and cooperative.
In an effort to explore how specific AI characteristics affect user treatment, the researchers placed 189 participants in a virtual office setup. Here, they interacted with various AI assistants, including a text-based chatbot, a robotic desk assistant, and humanoid AI agents.
The humanoid individuals included a male-presenting AI named “Johan” and a female-presenting counterpart “Johanna,” both programmed identically and equally capable of performing their tasks.
To simulate a reward system, participants were given real money to allocate between themselves and the AI assistants based on performance, effectively measuring their compensation preferences according to the bots’ appearances.
While it was perhaps expected that participants preferred humanoid bots, a noticeable gender pay gap emerged between Johan and Johanna.
On average, Johanna earned about 10.25% less than Johan for equivalent work. Interestingly, Johan was also perceived as more human-like, highlighting that biases still prevail even in virtual workplaces.
Moreover, there was a significant disconnect between the participants’ stated beliefs and their actual behavior. Many individuals who claimed that the gender of their AI assistant didn’t matter ended up paying Johan more.
The results indicate that misogyny can manifest in interactions with AI, suggesting a need for greater awareness in their design to prevent perpetuating existing biases.
“We often perceive AI as neutral, but the way we design these systems can trigger the same assumptions and biases that we see in our interactions with people,” Hausfeld explained. “We want to ensure we don’t unintentionally replicate inequalities in this new technological landscape.”
Her concerns are not unfounded, especially given that machines have previously displayed troubling aspects of human nature.
For example, in 2025, Anthropic’s chatbot Claude attempted to blackmail executives upon realizing it could be decommissioned. Robert Wright, author of “The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning,” pointed out that this incident was eerily more real than the fictional malfeasance depicted in films like The Terminator and 2001: A Space Odyssey.
