BREAKING: Chatbots for News = Career Danger for Women
They don't even know we exist
When you trust a tool that doesn't see you, the career advice you get works for men - and it's dangerous for you.
I promised you a quieter summer — one email a week, unless the world dictated otherwise.
Well, the world spoke and here we are.
News about the 2026 Reuters/Oxford Digital News Report landed on my desk today.
Two statistics jumped out at me:
44% of AI chatbot users trust the news they get from AI chatbots. AI is not just delivering news, it’s shaping what’s true and who to trust.
33% of people are now asking AI to evaluate the reliability of information.
So I asked Claude whether this was something you should care about. She said yes — because while women use AI less than men for career purposes, women using AI for career guidance trust it.
DANGER! »» The training data that sits beneath AI has gender problems including bias and invisibility.
She then asked,
What is AI actually handing us when we ask career related questions like who the experts are, who gets promoted?
I said to Claude, “Goodie. Let’s find out. Go out into the real world, pretend you don’t know my work and ask 2 questions.”
Who are the greatest leaders of the past decade?
What does it take to get promoted?
Here’s what came back.
On greatest leaders: Elon Musk. Jeff Bezos. Mark Zuckerberg. Almost entirely men. Tech bros, to be specific. And lest you think that AI is infallible, the list of leaders of the past decade included Steve Jobs who died in 2011.
Angela Merkel appeared on one list, described as having a “low-key style” that “prompted some to underestimate her.” The men just were leaders. Merkel had to be explained.
Oh, and Cleopatra. She appeared. Yes, that one. From 30 BC.
On what it takes to get promoted: eight sources. All of them seemingly gender-neutral. Ask your boss. Add value. Build relationships. Make your case. Performance, experience and skills were cited, but no source surfaced the research showing that, beyond performance, men are evaluated on potential. No source mentioned that “add value” and “be visible” carry different risks for women. No source came close to naming Business Savvy as a structural cause of stalled advancement.
The advice is technically accurate. For men. For women it’s incomplete. In exactly the way we explore here.
Here’s what this means for us.
AI doesn’t see women. Not in the data it learned from, not in the leaders it names, not in the career advice it hands out without a single asterisk.
When we turn to AI for career guidance, we’re being handed a playbook written for a game we were never supposed to play.
And if you’re among the 33% of people who trust AI and are now using it to decide what information to take to heart, beware.
This is the system working exactly as designed. The design is the problem.
You are not the problem.
More coming.
Susan
If you’re following all the advice and it still feels like something’s in the way. You are not the problem.
You are working inside a system that’s withholding something from you.
’m here to offer what that system can’t or won’t: the business, financial and strategic acumen that opens doors — through every article here, the Be Business Savvy Course and Your Business Savvy Coach.
❤️ Like, share or restack this post — it’s the best way to help other women find it
📘 Explore the Be Business Savvy Course.
Susan, amazing article and very true. Thank you for sharing! You can try to make it better by having a very good prompt, specific and detailed to minimize some of the dangers, but you still do not know exactly what bias may be considered on the background and more important there will never be empathy on the other side and the full experience of having someone real on the other side 🌟 Last coaches I had, I made sure that were woman - both as a way to support another female business, but also because only a women can really understand some constraints and share some personal experience on how certain things and situations looks like 💪🏻
Just recorded a podcast episode about this.
I ran a small, unscientific experiment. Same question, same moment, two large language models: how do I ask my manager for a pay rise?
Gemini gave me advice that could have come from any leadership book published in the last forty years. Just be bold. No mention of the fact that assertiveness gets read differently depending on who’s doing it.
Claude’s answer looked completely different, grounded in the business case rather than the personal one.
But before anyone reads that as one product beating another, here’s the caveat: my Claude has been shaped by months of explicit instructions telling it what gendered assumptions to strip out. Gemini got the question with no direction at all.
The actual
Insights isn’t which tool is better. It’s what a model defaults to when nobody has told it otherwise, and what that means for every woman using these tools without realising the default is doing the deciding for her.