---
title: "Even in the Machine, the Woman Comes Out Poorer"
description: "In a virtual Irish office, two identical AI agents did identical work. The one who looked female was paid 10.25% less"
author: "Jan Sokol"
published: 2026-10-08T18:15:29Z
modified: 2026-10-08T23:05:11Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/even-in-the-machine-the-woman-comes-out-poorer-b7094c
language: en
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Even in the Machine, the Woman Comes Out Poorer

*In a virtual Irish office, two identical AI agents did identical work. The one who looked female was paid 10.25% less*

By Jan Sokol · October 8, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/even-in-the-machine-the-woman-comes-out-poorer-b7094c

## In brief

- In a University of Limerick VR experiment, 189 participants worked alongside identical male- and female-presenting AI assistants
- The female agent Johanna was paid 10.25% less than the male agent Johan for the same work and was rated less human-like
- Co-author Dr. Mary Hausfeld warned against reproducing existing inequalities in a new technological setting
- The U.S. wage gap widened for a second consecutive year in 2024, a first in over 50 years of Census tracking
- New Census data show the female-to-male earnings ratio recovering from 80.6% to 83.9% in 2025

The office does not exist. It has no corridor, no coffee machine, no window onto a street. It was built inside virtual-reality headsets at the University of Limerick in Ireland, a place of pure experiment, and into it the researchers sent 189 flesh-and-blood workers to perform tasks alongside assistants made of code. What happened there, [as Jezebel reported](https://jezebel.com/even-ai-generated-women-are-paid-less-than-their-male-counterparts), is a small parable of our time: we have finally created workers without bodies, without histories, without anything to discriminate against, and we discriminated anyway.

## Johanna and Johan

The sixteen-page study gave the participants two AI agents with, in the words of the research, the same underlying capabilities. One presented as a woman, named Johanna. The other presented as a man — Johan in [the university’s own account of the study](https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1146341), Jonah in Jezebel’s telling. When the work was done, the humans were handed money and asked to pay themselves and their digital colleagues. Identical labour, identical machinery, identical results. The wages were not identical. Johanna walked out of the office that was not an office with 10.25% less than her male twin.

The ledger of the experiment, if Jonah’s pay is set at 100: Jonah: ████████████████████ 100 Johanna:██████████████████ 89.75 for the same work, on the same code — a gap of 10.25% [Euronews](https://www.euronews.com/2026/10/05/female-ai-agents-would-get-paid-10-less-than-male-ones-study-finds), reporting on the same study, notes that the humans did not stop at the money. Asked afterwards, they said they saw the male-presenting agent as more human than the female one. Pay the woman less, then grant her less personhood. It is an old sequence; only the payroll has changed.

> What is striking about our findings is that the technology behind these AI agents was exactly the same, but people did not treat them in the same way. As AI agents become more common in the workplace, we need to think carefully about the characteristics we give them and the behaviours those choices may encourage. We don’t want to inadvertently reproduce existing inequalities in a new technological setting.

So said Dr. Mary Hausfeld of the university’s business school, a co-author of the paper, in the statement accompanying its release. There is a long history in that word *inadvertently*. Rarely does anyone intend the gap. The gap simply follows, like a clerk carried over from the old administration into the new one, because nobody thought to dismiss him.

## The ledgers above ground

Meanwhile, in the offices that do exist, the arithmetic has been running the other way for two years. The U.S. Census Bureau found that America’s wage gap widened in 2024 for a second consecutive year — the first such reversal since the bureau began tracking income, poverty and health-insurance data in the 1960s. Men’s earnings rose; women’s stood still. The newest figures, released this September, show some recovery: the female-to-male earnings ratio climbed from 80.6 percent to 83.9 percent. [Forbes’s reading of the Census release](https://www.forbes.com/sites/kimelsesser/2026/09/17/new-census-data-shows-the-gender-pay-gap-narrowed-but-other-data-disagrees-whos-right/) confirms those numbers, while cautioning that other data tell a less cheerful story. A woman working in America today: 2024: ████████████████ 80.6 cents for each dollar a man earns 2025: █████████████████ 83.9 cents — an improvement, and still a tax of sixteen cents on the dollar, collected for the crime of being a woman

And the pay is only one column of the ledger. On Sunday, NBC reported a parallel gap in paid time off — women shorted there as well. One could chart this forever: the wages, the leave, the pensions, and now the ghost wages of the ghost workers. Equal Pay Day, the date on which American women finally catch up to what men earned the year before, keeps sliding deeper into the calendar, Jezebel notes, as if the year itself had learned to cheat.

Here is what the Limerick office teaches, if one is inclined to learn from it. The bias did not live in the machine. The machine had no preferences; the machine did not even have a name until someone gave it one. The bias came through the door wearing a headset, and it priced the female voice at ninety cents and found her slightly less human afterward, to justify the price. We are told the future will be staffed by agents such as Johanna and Johan, multiplied by the million. The people at Limerick have shown us, early and cheaply, what we intend to pay them. It is not full price. It never is. The prejudice, it turns out, is the one technology we have always managed to make portable.