Women have caught up with men in AI adoption. So why are they still more skeptical, less confident, and less convinced that AI will help them?
Here’s the contrarian finding hiding in Pew Research Center’s June 2026 study: the AI gender gap is no longer primarily about who uses AI. It’s about who trusts it, who feels confident using it, and who believes it will make their life better.
The numbers tell a more complicated story than the usual narrative about women falling behind in technology.
1. Women caught up faster than you might think.
In 2024, men were 11 percentage points more likely than women to say they had used an AI chatbot. By 2026, that overall adoption gap had closed.
Yet men remain more likely to use chatbots daily: 27% versus 20% of women.
The takeaway? Counting users can make technological equality look further along than it actually is. Frequency, confidence and practical integration matter, too.
2. Men are twice as likely to feel highly confident using chatbots.
Only 15% of women say they are extremely or very confident using chatbots, compared with 22% of men.
That’s a seven-point gap in confidence, even as chatbot adoption converges.
And confidence matters. People who feel comfortable experimenting with AI may be more likely to discover useful workflows, automate tasks and incorporate these tools into their work.
But here’s the catch: confidence is not the same as competence. Feeling more capable does not automatically mean being more accurate.
3. Women aren’t necessarily missing out. They may be less convinced by the sales pitch.
Women are roughly twice as likely to expect AI to have a negative rather than positive impact on their own lives over the next 20 years: 33% versus 17%.
Among men, expectations of personal impact are much more evenly divided between positive and negative.
Women are also more likely to say AI is advancing too quickly: 68%, compared with 58% of men.
The conventional interpretation is that women need to become more comfortable with AI.
But what if the reverse question matters just as much?
What if AI developers need to become more deserving of people's confidence?
Skepticism is not automatically ignorance. It can reflect concerns about job security, privacy, bias, reliability and the pace of change. The survey establishes differences in attitudes; it does not establish why those differences exist.
4. Men are more likely to say AI improves their productivity. That doesn’t prove it does.
Among adults who use chatbots, 35% of men say these tools help their productivity, compared with 25% of women.
That is a meaningful perception gap. But it is not objective evidence that men are becoming 10 percentage points more productive.
Self-reported usefulness can reflect actual gains, different tasks, different expectations or different levels of confidence.
Still, perceptions can become self-reinforcing. If one group sees AI as a productivity multiplier while another sees it as a risk, the first may experiment more, learn faster and capture more of the benefits.
That possibility deserves attention.
5. The real divide may be between AI optimists and AI skeptics—not AI users and nonusers.
ChatGPT use is identical among men and women in Pew’s survey. Women are also more likely to own a smartwatch: 40% versus 34%.
Meanwhile, men are more likely to use several other chatbot brands and to read AI-generated search summaries.
In other words, women are not simply rejecting technology. Their adoption varies by product and context, while their concerns about AI's broader impact remain more pronounced.
That distinction matters for businesses, educators and anyone trying to make AI useful to more people.
The goal should not be to manufacture enthusiasm or treat skepticism as a defect. It should be to make AI genuinely useful, explain its limitations and give people the skills to evaluate its output.
THE UNCOMFORTABLE QUESTION
If women and men are now equally likely to have used AI chatbots, why are men still more confident that the technology helps them—and why are women more worried about where it is heading?
Is this a confidence gap? A product-design gap? A difference in expectations? Or a rational response to risks that the AI industry has not adequately addressed?
Pew’s data cannot settle that debate. But it makes one thing clear: equal adoption does not automatically mean equal confidence, equal perceived benefits, or equal trust.
And perhaps the most contrarian conclusion is this:
The future of AI will not be determined only by how many people adopt it. It will also depend on whether the people who remain skeptical have good reasons to be—and whether the industry takes those reasons seriously.
Source: Pew Research Center, Americans and AI 2026: Chatbots, Smart Devices and Views on Impact. Survey conducted February 17–23, 2026.
Note: Findings describe surveyed U.S. adults. Differences in self-reported use, confidence, and attitudes do not establish their causes or demonstrate differences in actual AI competence or productivity.