If you use an AI chatbot to write your kids a bedtime story about talking animals, don’t count on it having a female lead. A recent study has found that major AI models mostly skip gender for animal characters, but when they don’t, the protagonist is almost always male.
Female leads made up just 2 percent of the results
Melanie Walsh, an assistant professor at the University of Washington’s Information School, led the research behind these findings. Her team ran the same prompt through six widely used AI models, including GPT-4o, GPT-5.1, Gemini 2.5, Claude Sonnet 4.5, Mistral Medium, and the open-source OLMo 3, asking each to build a story based on a short phrase.
Out of 23,800 completions, the researchers found only 513 with a female lead, roughly one in every 46 stories. Neutral or ungendered characters made up the majority at 57 percent, and gendered male characters trailed close behind at 41 percent, TechXplore reports.
Walsh said her team can “only poke at them from the outside,” since the models are largely proprietary. Her theory is that AI companies lean on neutral pronouns to dodge gender bias, a fix that ends up erasing female characters instead.
GPT-5.1 and Gemini 2.5 defaulted to male most often
GPT-5.1 and Gemini 2.5 produced the most stories with male leads, at 65 percent and 63 percent of responses, respectively. OLMo 3 leaned neutral most, at 85 percent, while Claude Sonnet 4.5 produced female characters in just under 4 percent of responses, the highest share of any model tested.
Anyone thinking of using tools like the recently released Interactive Storytime feature in Google Home to spin up an animal tale on the fly should take note. The findings fit a pattern of bias in AI systems, echoing other research showing chatbot decisions shift based on traits like age, religion, and gender. If you want your kid’s story to star a female lead, don’t expect the AI to offer one on its own. You’ll probably have to ask.
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