The Gender Pay Gap Is Widening. AI Adoption May Be Part of the Story.

Two articles published today caught my attention. With Women’s History Month underway and International Women’s Day approaching on Sunday, the timing feels particularly relevant.

One article reports that the gender pay gap is widening again, reversing progress that had been made in recent years. The other highlights that men are using artificial intelligence more frequently than women. The first point is troubling. The second, unfortunately, is not surprising.

According to a Glassdoor analysis cited by CNBC, progress toward closing the gender pay gap has been slow and inconsistent. In fact, the gap widened for the second consecutive year in 2024. Women earned 81 cents for every dollar paid to a man, down from 83 cents in 2023 and 84 cents in 2022.

At the same time, another CNBC report highlights a separate but related dynamic: men are currently using artificial intelligence tools more often than women. In the CNBC article “AI’s Got a Gender Gap: Women Are More Skeptical,” survey data suggests that men are more likely to view AI as a valuable assistant, while women tend to approach the technology with greater skepticism.

That perception gap may help explain the difference in adoption.

For decades, many administrative and operational roles have been disproportionately held by women. Today, approximately 80% of administrative professionals are women, according to workforce data from the International Association of Administrative Professionals.

The challenge is that many of the tasks historically associated with administrative work, scheduling, information gathering, documentation, coordination, are precisely the types of activities that AI systems increasingly assist with.

When a new technology enters a domain that has historically been “owned” by a professional group, it can easily be perceived as a competitor rather than a collaborator.

That reaction is understandable.  But it may also be strategically risky.

According to Microsoft estimates referenced earlier this year, approximately 16.3% of the global population is currently using generative AI tools as of early 2026. This means most people are still experimenting with the technology, and relatively few professionals are building structured workflows around it.

The implication is important: the field is still wide open.

Artificial intelligence does not simply replace tasks, it can also expand the scope of what professionals are able to do.

For example, instead of spending hours manually gathering information for a briefing or presentation, a professional could use AI to rapidly summarize multiple articles, extract key insights, and generate a first draft of a research memo in minutes. The human role then shifts from performing the basic task to interpreting the insights, refining the analysis, and making strategic decisions based on the information.

Used this way, AI becomes less of a threat and more of a capability multiplier.

For women who want to maintain, and expand, the workplace gains made over the past several decades, engaging with AI cannot remain optional. It must move beyond occasional experimentation and toward intentional use in research, decision support, workflow design, and operational analysis.

Artificial intelligence will continue to reshape how work gets done across industries.

The question is not whether this transformation will happen. It already is.

The more important question is who chooses to learn how to work with these systems, and who chooses to sit on the sidelines while others define the next generation of work.

As International Women’s Day approaches, this moment may be less about celebrating past progress and more about thinking strategically about the next frontier of professional leverage.

Sources

CNBC. AI’s Got a Gender Gap: Women Are More Skeptical
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/06/gender-gap-in-ai-revealed-in-cnbc-surveymonkey-women-at-work-survey.html

CNBC. Gender Pay Gap Doubles Over the Course of Women’s Careers
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/06/gender-pay-gap-doubles-over-the-course-of-womens-careers-glassdoor-report.html