AI Agents Successfully Recreate the Gender Pay Gap

We can replace human workers with AI agents, but we can’t take sexism out of the workplace. A recently published study from researchers at Ireland’s University of Limerick found that existing conscious and unconscious gender biases extend to AI agents, resulting in female-presenting bots getting paid less than their male-presenting counterparts.

The study took 189 knowledge workers and placed them in a virtual reality office where they were made to work alongside three different AI agents to complete tasks. Those agents functioned identically, but they had different presentations. One was a text-based chatbot, one was a deskbound assistant with a robotic presentation, and one was given human-like qualities, including either male- or female-presenting characteristics.

Those workers were asked to rate the work of each assistant and allocate pay to them based on their performance. Researchers found that the human-like presentation resonated more with the workers, who rewarded the faux people with more than their more robotic counterparts.

However, there was a disparity in which human presentation got paid more. The male “Johan” assistant was paid about 10% more on average than the female “Johanna” despite performing exactly the same—not too terribly far off the real-life gender pay gap. Even more troubling than the pay disparity is the humanity gap, as the researchers found that “Johan” was perceived as more human-like than “Johanna.”