New research from University of Limerick has found gender bias in the workplace could be replicated in interactions with artificial intelligence.
The study, co-authored by Dr Mary Hausfeld of UL's Kemmy Business School, examined whether the way Artificial intelligence (AI) assistants are presented influences how people treat them in a workplace setting.
Researchers placed 189 workers in a virtual reality office and asked them to complete work-related tasks with different AI assistants, including human-like agents presented with either male or female appearance.
Participants were then given real money to divide between themselves and the AI assistant for completing the tasks, allowing the researchers to recreate a real-world transaction and examine how much people were willing to pay AI for its work.
AI agents with a female appearance were paid less than their male-presenting counterparts, despite using the same underlying technology, according to the research.
The AI agents had the same underlying capabilities, yet participants treated them differently depending on how they were presented.
The male-presenting AI agent, 'Johan', received higher monetary rewards than the female-presenting agent, 'Johanna', while it was also perceived as more human-like.
Specifically, Johanna was paid 10.25% less than Johan for completing the same work.
The findings suggest that gender biases familiar from human workplaces could be reproduced in interactions with artificial intelligence, even when there is no difference in the technology.
Dr Hausfeld said the results raise important questions as AI agents increasingly become part of people's working lives.
“What is striking about our findings is that the technology behind these AI agents was exactly the same, but people did not treat them in the same way.
“We often think of AI as being neutral, but the way we design and present these systems can activate those same assumptions and biases that exist in our interactions with other people.
“As AI agents become more common in the workplace, we need to think carefully about the characteristics we give them and the behaviours those choices may encourage. We don't want to inadvertently reproduce existing inequalities in a new technological setting.”
The gender finding was part of a broader investigation into how the human-like appearance of AI influences workplace interactions.
Participants in the study worked with a text-based chatbot, a desk robot, and human-like AI agents. Although the systems were powered by the same underlying AI, participants trusted the human-like assistants more and gave them more credit for their contribution than the robot.
The researchers also discovered a significant gap between what participants said influenced them and how they actually behaved.
Many participants said they preferred AI that was clearly non-human and most indicated that the gender of an AI assistant did not matter to them. However, their subsequent evaluations and reward decisions indicated that these design characteristics could still influence their behaviour.
Participants also suggested they had no preference for an AI with female or male attributes, but their behaviour told a different story.
The findings highlight an emerging challenge for organisations as AI develops from a tool employees use into increasingly human-like AI agents that can act as coworkers and collaborators.
Dr Hausfeld argues that choices around the appearance and presentation of AI agents should therefore not be regarded simply as aesthetic design decisions. "Such choices may affect how much people trust AI, how they judge its contribution, and even how they financially reward it."
The study was conducted by Isabelle Cuber and Tarek Alakmeh of the University of Zurich, Mary Hausfeld of University of Limerick, Anand van Zelderen of SKEMA Business School, Moritz Jenny, Jochen Menges, and Thomas Fritz of the University of Zurich.
Human-Like and Male? How AI Assistant Design Relates to Trust and Monetary Reward at Work in VR will be presented at the 14th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, NordiCHI ’26, in Vaasa, Finland, 5 - 7 October and published in the conference proceedings by the Association for Computing Machinery.
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
Experimental study
People
Human-Like and Male? How AI Assistant Design Relates to Trust and Monetary Reward at Work in VR
2-Oct-2026