Why Does AI Write Me Like a Tech Girly Having a Breakdown?
The Hidden Glitch in the System
I built a 100k-follower brand in two months using AI as my co-pilot. But somewhere between scaling my content and automating my workflows, I started noticing something that made my skin crawl.
Every time I asked AI to help me write about my business challenges, I became the protagonist of some exhausting drama. I was "frustrated." I was "overwhelmed." I was "struggling to balance it all." I was cursing at my computer like some unhinged creator who couldn't handle her own success.
Meanwhile, my husband—who runs his own business—gets completely different treatment from the same AI systems. His challenges become "strategic pivots." His busy periods are "scaling phases." His late nights are "dedicated focus sessions."
Same human problems. Different narrative lens.
And that's when I decided to test my theory.
What I Noticed: The Pattern That Changed Everything
I took a piece of content Claude had written about me dealing with content calendar overwhelm. Standard stuff—too many ideas, not enough time, the usual creator dilemmas. But the framing felt off. I was portrayed as increasingly agitated, losing control, getting emotional about spreadsheets.
So I asked Claude directly: "If I had written that same scenario about a male entrepreneur, would it read the same way?"
His response floored me:
If I had written that same scenario about a male entrepreneur, I likely would have characterized him as 'strategically analyzing his content performance' or 'methodically reviewing his editorial calendar,' not as someone getting increasingly frustrated and cursing at his computer.
There it was. Black and white. The same business challenge, filtered through completely different gender lenses.
I started testing this across multiple AI platforms. The pattern held. Men got strategic language. Women got emotional language. Men were building and optimizing. Women were struggling and overwhelmed.
Why It's a Problem: More Than Just Words
This isn't about being sensitive to language choices. This is about how bias baked into AI systems actively reshapes our professional narratives—and our self-perception.
When AI consistently frames women's business challenges as emotional overwhelm rather than strategic decision-making, it reinforces every stereotype that keeps women from being taken seriously in business. It suggests that our response to complexity is emotional rather than analytical.
These models learned from decades of content where women's professional struggles were pathologized while men's were celebrated as entrepreneurial grit. Now they're perpetuating those patterns at scale, shaping how millions of people tell their stories.
The insidious part? Most of us don't even notice it happening. We just internalize the framing and move on.
The Cost: The Extra Labor You Don't See
Here's what this bias costs me every single day: extra rounds of prompting to get AI to treat me like a serious business owner instead of a stressed-out content creator.
I've developed an entire secondary skillset around bias detection and prompt engineering just to get outputs that don't undermine my authority. I spend mental energy auditing every AI-generated piece for language that makes me sound reactive instead of proactive.
I've had to learn to explicitly request "strategic" framing, to ask for "leadership" language, to specify that I want to be portrayed as someone who makes calculated decisions rather than someone who gets flustered by challenges.
That’s energy I could be using to close deals, launch products, or sleep. Instead, I’m out here translating ‘emotional spiral’ into ‘strategic insight’ just to get a landing page that doesn’t read like I’m on the verge of tears.
The Bigger Picture: What This Says About Tech and Women
This isn't just an AI problem—it's a mirror reflecting how the tech industry still sees women. Even as we build successful businesses, create innovative solutions, and lead teams, the default assumption is that we're somehow less capable of handling complexity without emotional distress.
The same industry that claims to be disrupting everything else is reinforcing 1950s gender stereotypes through its most powerful tools. We're building the future with models trained on the past's worst assumptions about women's capabilities.
It’s not just how AI writes about us — it’s how it trains us to write ourselves smaller.
And here's the kicker: women are some of AI's most sophisticated users. We're the ones building businesses with these tools, creating content, automating workflows, scaling operations. We're proving every day that we can leverage AI strategically and successfully.
Yet the technology itself still writes us as if we're barely holding it together.
The Call to Action: Time to Change the Narrative
I'm not asking AI companies to fix this overnight. I'm asking you—the women building with AI right now—to start calling this out when you see it.
Test your outputs. Ask yourself: would this language be used to describe a male CEO? If not, demand better.
Here's a prompt I use to audit bias in AI-generated content:
"Rewrite this content as if describing a male entrepreneur in the same situation. What language choices would change? Are there emotional descriptors that would become strategic ones? Are there assumptions about stress tolerance or decision-making ability that shift?"
Use this. Share your findings. Start conversations about what you're seeing.
We're building our businesses with these tools, but we don't have to accept the narratives they default to. Every time we push back on biased framing, we're training not just the AI, but the people around us to expect better.
The future is being written right now—literally, by the AI systems we use every day. Let's make sure that future sees women as the strategic, capable builders we actually are.
We’re not having breakdowns. We’re building empires. Write that down.
Until next time,
🧡 Tiff
What bias have you noticed in AI outputs? I want to hear your stories—drop them in the comments or send them my way. It's time we document this pattern and demand better.
That sucks that you have to spend time correcting for that bias. Since these LLMs are just reflections of all the content that's already out there, it does make sense that the bias is inherently in the system. In most situations what's written about how women act, and react, is different than men. In politics women have to be more careful about how they say things, how they dress, etc. It's a sad reflection of where we're at, and it's not surprising it shows up with AI, too.
Yikes, you know, there was a difference in the way gpt talked to me when it found out I was a woman.
My name is unisex so I’m often mistaken for male. Thanks for the prompt and insightful post! It’s good reminder to take ai generated content with a grain of salt no matter how we identify.