Will AI resolve inequity?
Women’s wellbeing & gendered cognitive stickiness
Nobel Prize Winner Professor Claudia Goldin showed that equity at work starts in the home: “They are two sides of the same coin. If we can achieve equity within families, we will have a much better chance of achieving gender equality (including earnings equity) at work.”
Unfortunately, the evidence shows that things at home aren’t quite even yet. A 2025 study of 2,133 partnered US parents found that while women's employment and earnings reduced the amount of physical household work they performed, they did not reduce their cognitive load.
The researchers describe this as "gendered cognitive stickiness": once responsibility for anticipating, planning and monitoring family life becomes attached to women, it can be remarkably difficult to shift.
Other research paints a similar picture. A study of 322 mothers found that cognitive household labour was even more unequally distributed than physical household labour, and that carrying more of it was associated with stress, burnout, poorer mental health and poorer relationship functioning.
Efficiency is not the same as equity
Now imagine the promise of AI in the context of an endless stream of school emails, permission slips, holiday program researching, medical appointment booking and reminding, medication tracking, and so much more.
There’s the techno-optimistic angle, which says AI will liberate women from much of this burden and will contribute to greater equity. And then there’s the more cautious voices, including a recent TIME article by Stanford sociologist Marianne Cooper, which questions whether efficiency is the same as equity.
We've been promised that technology would liberate women before. Washing machines, vacuum cleaners and other labour-saving technologies reduced the effort involved in individual tasks, but they also raised expectations about how clean and well-run a home should be. Technology has made more possible, and "more" has become the new standard.
AI could do the same thing. If AI makes it easier to optimise children's activities, monitor ageing parents, plan nutritionally perfect meals, manage family calendars and respond instantly to every school communication, does it actually give women time back? Or does it simply expand what a "good" mother, partner, leader and employee is expected to manage?
AI’s impact on women’s lives cannot be separated from careers
None of these questions about women’s responsibilities, pressures, and experiences can be separated from what happens in the context of women’s careers.
And it’s that interaction between what happens at work, what happens in life, and what happens in the home that we keep coming back to at EVEN Careers as we explore women, work and AI: productivity gains (at home and work) only matter if women get to keep some of the dividend.
We would love to see the opportunity afforded by AI to not just be used to help women do everything more efficiently. We want to see engagement with a more fundamental question:
What could women stop doing altogether that would improve their experience of life, leadership and careers?
EVEN Careers is exploring women, work and wellbeing through Women, Work & AI, a national research initiative into how AI is reshaping women's careers, leadership and wellbeing.