Are AI agent names sexist?
Following a conversation on LinkedIn, we wanted to see if AI agent names skew male or female, and whether that varies by task area. There was some suggestion that AI agents for tasks like coding might be given male names, and AI agents for tasks like administration might be given female names.
We looked at a few hundred companies. All the ones listed on the G2 Global Software Companies list, the Forbes Cloud 100, the Sifted Rising 100 and Vertice’s Top 100. We asked ChatGPT and Claude to each come up with 100-200 named AI agents. We combined everything, and filtered for only companies that are wholly/mostly B2B (because that’s our space).
The results?
500 SaaS companies.
270 with agents.
44 with genderable names.
28 female, 16 male.
Overall and by category, if there is a bias, it is towards female names - but the sample size of 44 is too small to say conclusively.
This is not perfect work. Categorizing agents can be subjective. Some are more clearly named than others. One could probably debate over whether some names are male or female. We could have looked at more agents. And so on.
For what it’s worth, here is the spreadsheet.
