Why Women Are Hesitant About AI, and Why I Don't Think We Can Afford to Be

In December, I quit my job with no real plan except a feeling that my next move needed to involve AI. I just didn’t know what that meant yet.

By February, I’d already picked Claude specifically, before it was the obvious choice. Then in March, the rest of the internet caught up. Anthropic had refused a Pentagon request to use Claude for mass domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons, and OpenAI struck a deal with the DoD anyway. Millions of people ended up publicly boycotting or canceling ChatGPT over it. I remember thinking, oh, I picked right, but I’d made that call two months earlier for my own reasons, not because the internet told me to.

What I wasn’t sure about was the “whatever came next” part. I flirted with an operations and automations business. I considered AI voice agents and talked myself out of it, I didn’t feel ready, and I definitely wasn’t ready to convince clients to put a voice bot in front of their customers. I landed, eventually, on AI-assisted content and AEO.

I was ashamed of using AI

For months, I flip-flopped. Some days I was building. Other days I felt outright ashamed of what I was building, because the commentary around AI is loud and it is not gentle: it’s taking jobs, it’s stealing from creatives, it’s damaging the environment. I never want to be on the wrong side of that. So I sat with it. A lot.

(If you’ve ever closed a tab fast because using AI felt like it said something bad about you, I see you. That was me, for months.)

Then I noticed something that made me annoyed

While I was busy having an ethical crisis, I watched some pretty average bros use AI completely unapologetically, post rough, obviously-AI output (let’s call it what it is, AI slop), and still land clients and build audiences without a flicker of self-doubt.

And I got annoyed. Not because they were using AI. Because I knew I could do it better. I had the actual marketing experience to know what a client needs, the judgment to know what “good” looks like, and the willingness to slow down and make sure the output sounded like a person, not a robot wearing a person costume. I just hadn’t given myself permission to use the tool with that same confidence yet.

The fear was never really about losing work

Here’s what I eventually figured out: my fear was never “AI is going to take my job.” It was “if I don’t use this, I’m going to sell myself short.” Some of it was worry about what people would think of my skills if I leaned on a tool. But mostly, it was the fear of watching an entire industry shift and choosing to stand still.

I’ve watched this exact tension play out in a Facebook group for women in marketing. Everywhere else online, marketers were AI-forward, prompt packs as freebies, Claude and ChatGPT tips shared like recipe cards. In that one group, though, the response to any AI question was some version of “hire a human” or “use your own brain,” which, read closely, implies that using AI means you’re cutting corners, right?

Here’s the pattern I noticed. Most of the women in that group are freelance marketers or small agency owners, exactly the people whose services AI can most directly touch. The bigger, more established players I follow? Almost all AI-forward. No shame about it at all.

I don’t think that’s a coincidence, and I don’t think it’s really about talent. I think the difference between the businesses that are stuck and the ones that keep growing is starting to come down to whether you’re willing to experiment with the tool that scares you, or whether you’re using the fear as a reason to stay exactly where you are.

Why are women actually slower to adopt AI?

Women are, on average, slower to adopt AI than men. A Pew Research survey from earlier this year found usage rates between men and women have nearly closed. But a second number tells the real story: only 25% of women say these tools actually help their productivity, compared to 35% of men. We’re in the room. We’re just not convinced it’s working for us.

A 2026 Oxford-led study dug into why women adopt AI more slowly, and it’s not a confidence problem. Women are more concerned than men about AI’s impact on jobs, privacy, mental health, and the environment, the same things the “hire a human” commenters are worried about, and honestly, they’re not wrong to worry. That same research found this: when women’s outlook on AI’s societal impact improved even a little, usage jumped from 13% to 33%.

So here’s my point

If we want the narrative around AI to change, the people who are the most thoughtful about its risks can’t be the ones sitting it out. Refusing to touch it doesn’t slow it down. It just means the people asking the hard questions aren’t in the room while the norms get set.

AI isn’t going away. I think the people telling themselves it is are mostly telling themselves a story that lets them stay comfortable. The move isn’t blind adoption either. It’s finding a way to use it that you can actually stand behind ethically, and then doing it anyway instead of waiting to feel 100% resolved first.

I didn’t get there by reading a think piece. I got there by using it, hating some of what it gave me, fixing it, noticing what only I could add, and slowly trusting myself again. I wrote about what that process actually looks like in a post on writing in your own voice with Claude, this one’s more about the why behind starting at all.

If any of that sounds familiar, I want to know: what’s actually stopping you from using AI in your business?

I’m building something for women who want to figure this out without the tech-bro energy. More on that soon. For now, I’d love to hear what’s in your way, drop it in the comments.