Men are more likely than women to say they recognize AI industry leaders—including people who do not exist. In a Harvard survey of more than 5,400 Americans, 73% of men said they knew OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and 53% said they recognized Mira Murati, Susan Milner, and Craig Dalton. Murati is real: she is the former CTO of OpenAI and now CEO of Thinking Machine Labs. Milner and Dalton are fictional. Among women, 40% claimed to recognize the fake names, and 38% said they knew Murati.
The gap is more about confidence than competence, according to Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center. Men used AI more frequently and answered factual questions slightly better on average, but men and women got questions wrong at similar rates. The main difference was that women said 'not sure' an average of 3.3 times out of 12 questions, compared with 2.3 times for men.
The pattern extends to media coverage. Over a year, men were named in AI headlines more than 14 times as often as women. Among people quoted as subject experts, three-quarters were men—a higher proportion than the roughly 29% of women in the AI talent pool. Laura Manley, the center's executive director, said both men and women rated concern as their top emotional response to AI, but women were more fearful while men rated positive feelings such as excitement higher. She argued that more experts should be willing to say 'not sure' rather than projecting confidence in either doom or abundance.