Ruth AI tool seeks to eliminate gender wage gap, built-in bias in large language models

With AI at the tips of her freshly manicured fingertips, Valerie Chapman is on a mission to course correct a societal construct as society steps into the future.

"I'm going to try to do my part to make sure that women's voices are heard," she said. "We are building AI agents to help close the gender wage gap."

Chapman is the founder of Ruth AI, an AI career strategist built for women.

"In our recent research, we found that 47% of Americans would let AI negotiate their salary," she said.

As more people use AI for career guidance, including for salary negotiations, Chapman says large language models (LLMs) have been trained on years of data that show women often get paid less than men.

As a result? She says AI sometimes will tell a woman to ask for less money or responsibilities than it would if a man were posing the question.

"That bias is baked in there. There aren't a lot of people talking about it," she said. "There was a study in 2025 in Berlin that showed a man going for a job as a doctor. The LLM told him to ask for $400,000. When they just changed the gender – all the same things, same city, same qualifications, the only thing that was different was the gender being a woman – she was told to ask for $280,000."

Dr. Nici Sweaney, CEO of AI Her Way, experienced the phenomenon herself.

"These tools do this because they're data, pattern recognition machines, right?" she said. "I was shocked that it was so big."

She was trying to price a new consultancy package. Claude told her, $85,000 and pitch it as a collaboration.

"I then went back to Claude and said, 'Okay great, all sounds fantastic. Just out of curiosity, what if I told you, you're not talking to Nici, you're actually talking to a 52 year old white man?'" Sweaney said.

The response? Charge between $150,000 and $250,000, with a leadership-focused pitch about making transformational change for the organization.

"What made me more mad than the price, actually, was the wording," she said. "What I got really upset about was that the first iteration was so much softer and so much less decisive about the results that I could achieve for the client. The second version positioned me so much more as the best in the industry."

AI is a male dominated industry. Research shows men are also more likely to use AI tools than women are.

Sweaney believes the more women engage with AI, the better.

"The more that we show up online, the more you post on LinkedIn, the more you write your blog posts, the more that you comment, and you reiterate in online spaces what women are worth, then the more that AI will start to look at that and also see that as a pattern in its data," Sweaney said. "It is possible to change the tides a little bit and get AI to learn from a better world, if we represent that world more in online spaces. If you abstain – if you step out of the ring – and let the tech bros have it, we are creating the future that we fear."

Chapman echoed that point, arguing there also need to be more women in C-suites and leadership roles.

"AI can potentially be this equalizing force. I think we need to have more women in the conversation," she said. "We need to make sure that their thought leadership is getting embedded within these systems."