Men More Likely to Bluff About AI Knowledge; 53% Say They Recognize Fictitious Execs, Harvard Study Finds

More than half of the American men surveyed for a new Harvard University study said they recognised two senior figures in artificial intelligence who do not exist, a finding the authors cite as a sign that men tend to overstate how much they know about the technology.

The study, titled 'Are Women Being Left Out of AI?,' was released on 14 October by the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. It drew on a survey of 5,403 adults across the United States, carried out between 10 and 16 July 2026, together with desktop browsing data and an analysis of more than 78,000 news articles about AI.

A Recognition Test With Invented Names

As part of a name-recognition exercise, respondents were shown a list of people working in AI and asked whether they knew who each one was. The researchers mixed in two invented, ordinary-sounding names, Susan Millner and Craig Dalton. Among men, 53 percent claimed to recognise the fictional pair. Among women, the figure was 40 percent.

The invented names were recognised about as often as some real ones. Men said they recognised Susan Millner and Craig Dalton as often as they recognised Mira Murati, OpenAI's former chief technology officer, who was identified by 53 percent of men and 38 percent of women. By contrast, 73 percent of men said they knew the OpenAI chief executive, Sam Altman.

On 12 factual questions about how AI actually works, the gap between the sexes was far smaller. Men answered an average of 7.1 correctly and women 6.3. Women were also more likely to say they were unsure, choosing 'not sure' on 4 questions on average, compared with 2.9 among men. The report concluded that much of the apparent knowledge gap reflected greater confidence, and in some cases over-confidence, among men rather than deeper understanding.

Laura Manley, executive director of the Shorenstein Center, said men came across as 'more optimistic and more confident' about AI across the board. The sharpest divides in attention to the technology appeared among graduates and among those in households earning more than $100,000 (around £74,700) a year.

A Wider Gender Divide

The confidence gap sat alongside broader differences in how the two groups use and view AI. Women were more likely than men to say they had never used the tools, 29 per cent against 22 per cent, and less likely to use them regularly.

Among those who did use AI, men spent a larger share of their time online on such tools than women, 4.6 per cent against 2.9 per cent. Trust was low on both sides, though lower among women. Nearly a quarter of women (23 percent) said they trusted none of the sources asked about to provide reliable information on AI, compared with 15 percent of men.

Both men and women agreed that men's needs and perspectives were better represented in how AI is built and in the content it produces. The report found the same imbalance in who gets heard.

Across a year of US coverage, from July 2025 to June 2026, men were named in AI headlines 14.6 times as often as women and quoted as experts 4.3 times as often. About 70 per cent of the experts cited were men, even though women make up roughly 29 per cent of workers with AI engineering skills, according to World Economic Forum data referenced in the report. Women, the authors noted, are seldom featured as expert voices on the technology.

The report also pointed to the workplace. Citing International Labour Organization data, it said 4.7 per cent of women's jobs worldwide fall into the occupations most exposed to automation by generative AI, against 2.4 per cent of men's. In high-income countries, the gap widens to 9.6 per cent of women's jobs versus 3.5 per cent of men's.

The research was led by Nancy Gibbs, the Shorenstein Center's director, and Matthew Baum, a professor of global communications at Harvard Kennedy School, with Manley, senior researcher Brian Friedberg, and senior data scientist Allison Wan as authors. It was funded by Pivotal, the group founded by the philanthropist Melinda French Gates.

The authors said the results offered a baseline for tracking gender gaps as AI reaches further into work, education, and everyday decisions. They urged employers, journalists, and developers to widen access to training and to broaden the pool of people treated as authorities on the technology.