MIT researchers find AI chatbots cost women $60,000 in financial advice

Ask a chatbot for financial advice and you might get a perfectly reasonable answer. But if you’re a woman, that “perfectly reasonable” answer could leave you roughly $60,000 poorer by age 60, according to new research from MIT. A working paper from MIT Sloan School of Management found that AI chatbots systematically deliver more conservative financial guidance to women than to men, resulting in a simulated wealth gap of about 4.1% over a lifetime. The culprit is a cocktail of gendered language patterns and the AI’s own interpretive biases. How the bias works The study, co-authored by MIT Sloan assistant professor Taha Choukhmane alongside Stanford’s Tim de Silva and MIT researchers Weidong Lin and Matthew Akuzawa, ran simulations using models including ChatGPT 5.2 and Gemini 3 Flash. Prompts were sourced from roughly 1,000 participants, and the researchers tracked how the AI’s financial recommendations played out across an entire simulated lifetime. When women asked for financial advice, the AI recommended lower equity allocations and less frequent portfolio rebalancing. Lower stock exposure over decades compounds into a significant shortfall, the kind of slow-drip disadvantage tha...