Gender bias in AI assistants: How design influences trust and rewards
Do we treat AI assistants differently depending on whether they appear male or female? A new study involving Prof. Dr. Thomas Fritz reveals how the design of AI assistants can influence trust, perceptions, and even financial rewards.
As AI assistants increasingly become part of our working lives, their appearance and design can influence how we interact with them. But does it make a difference whether an AI assistant looks human, or whether it is presented as male or female?
A research team including Prof. Dr. Thomas Fritz from the Department of Informatics at the University of Zurich investigated these questions in a study involving 189 participants. In a virtual reality environment, participants worked alongside AI assistants presented as a text-based chatbot, a virtual robot, or human-like male and female avatars. While the assistants were technically identical, their different appearances influenced how participants perceived and rewarded them.
One particularly striking finding was that female-presenting AI assistants received 10.25% lower financial rewards than their male-presenting counterparts. Male-presenting assistants were also perceived as more human-like, even though the underlying technology was the same. Interestingly, most participants interviewed after the experiment said that gender did not matter to them – highlighting a gap between stated attitudes and actual behavior.
The study also found that the more human-like an AI assistant appeared to participants, the more they tended to trust and reward it. While human-like designs can make interactions feel more natural, they also raise important questions about excessive trust and the risk of reinforcing existing gender stereotypes.
In a UZH News interview, Thomas discusses these findings and their implications for the design of future AI assistants. He emphasizes the importance of transparency: even as interactions with AI become increasingly human-like, users should remain aware that they are communicating with an artificial system.
The study, “Human-Like and Male? How AI Assistant Design Relates to Trust and Monetary Reward at Work in VR”, was presented at the 14th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (NordiCHI 2026), held from 3 to 7 October 2026 in Vaasa, Finland.