AI agents with female personas receive 10% less pay in study

A study conducted by the University of Limerick has found that AI agents with feminine appearances or identities are paid 10% less than their male counterparts for performing the same tasks. The research, titled “Human-Like and Male? How AI Assistant Design Relates to Trust and Monetary Reward at Work in VR”, explored how gender influences human interaction with artificial intelligence in professional settings.

To simulate real-world conditions, researchers placed 189 workers in a virtual reality office environment. Participants worked alongside four different AI assistants: a text-based chatbot, a desktop robot, and two human-like agents named Johan and Johanna. While all agents utilized the same underlying OpenAI model (gpt-4-1106-preview) and possessed identical functionalities, the human participants used real money to remunerate the agents based on their performance.

Although participants rated the quality of work from both human-like agents similarly, the female-presenting agent received significantly lower monetary rewards. These findings emerge as AI integration accelerates, with data from IT consultancy Accelirate indicating that nearly 79% of companies are already using AI agents.