A June 2026 Anthropic Economic Index Report may illuminate the connection between women’s lower adoption rates and the oft cited fear of perception penalty of AI use in the workplace. The report notes that proportionally, women are using LLMs in a more iterative manner whereas men are using them to deploy agentic workflows. This divergence in usage behavior points to women using the tool for collaborative work like emails, copy or marketing analytics while men using the tool for automations like custom API integration, predictive analyses or automated sales pipelines.  The iterative style of use which manifests deliverables in generative copy is ripe for detection and negative perception, whereas the automation use cases are seen as shrewd strategic improvements. Both of these styles of use generate value, but integrating infrastructural gains through automation can have a cumulative benefit to the success of business operations and is likely to be perceived as more favorable.

If your use of AI is typically iterative, try to transition from asking to building. Start by automating your most repetitive tasks and chaining tasks together to move from singular queries into the realm of systems level thinking.  Next, explicitly control the narrative surrounding your AI integration. Quantify the time saved, name the process improved, and claim the gain. Move from individual execution to group strategy by using meetings to confidently suggest ways to templetise recurring deliverables. Transition from personal efficiency into organizational value by safely connecting AI to your data: point it at a spreadsheet, a folder of documents, or a dataset, or build one small internal tool like a custom GPT, a dashboard, or a chatbot trained on team FAQs. To protect our roles in tomorrow’s workforce, women should aim to position themselves as AI architects delivering cumulative strategic benefits rather than skilled users delivering personal efficiency.