Gender discrimination in education hinders women’s representation in variousfields. How can we create a gender-neutral learning environment when teachers’ gendercomposition and mindset are slow to change? Recent development in artificial intelligence(AI) provides a way to achieve this goal as engineers can make AI trainers gender neutraland not take gender-related information as input. We use data from a natural experimentin which such AI trainers replace some human teachers for a male-dominated strategicboard game to test the effectiveness of AI training. The introduction of AI improves teach-ing outcomes for boys and girls and reduces the preexisting gender gap. Survey responsesindicate that AI’s information advantage, friendly appearance, and interactive featureshelped students to learn faster, and class recordings suggest that AI trainers’ nondiscrimi-natory emotional status can explain the improvement in gender equality. We demonstrateAI’s potential in improving learning outcomes and promoting diversity, equity, and inclu-sion in analogous settings.

Publication:

Management Science

https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.02787

Author:

Leo Bao

Department of Banking and Finance, Monash Business School, Monash University, Caulfield East, Victoria 3145, Australia

Corresponding author

Contact: Leo.Bao@monash.edu

Difang Huang

Academy ofMathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China

Chen Lin

Faculty of Business and Economics, University ofHong Kong, Hong Kong