Harvard survey: as many Americans 'recognise' two made-up AI leaders as Mira Murati or Fei-Fei Li

What's going on? A new report from Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein CenterDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, "Are Women Being Left Out of AI?", published on 14 October, slipped two fabricated, ordinary-sounding names, "Susan Millner" and "Craig Dalton", into a list of AI leaders shown to more than 5,400 US adults. 46% of respondents said they recognised them — exactly the same share that said they recognised Mira Murati and Fei-Fei Li.

The confidence gap: According to WIRED's reading of the data, 53% of men claimed to know the fictional leaders, versus 40% of women. Men used AI more often and answered more factual AI questions correctly on average, but men and women got answers wrong at about the same rate; the difference was that women more often said they were "not sure" (3.3 of 12 questions, versus 2.3 for men). "There's so much confidence in either doom or abundance," executive director Laura Manley told WIRED. "It just drowns out all of the voices that should be saying 'not sure.'"

Who gets airtime: Across 78,542 US news articles about AI from July 2025 to June 2026, men were named in headlines 14.6 times as often as women and cited as experts 4.3 times as often, even after removing executives, founders, officials and investors. The most recognised woman in AI, Anthropic co-founder Daniela Amodei (49%), was still slightly less recognised than the least recognised men on the list, Jensen Huang and Dario Amodei (50% each); Sam Altman was the best-known AI-specific leader at 64%.

Usage and training: 46% of women say they never use AI at work, compared with 36% of men, and 64% of women report receiving no workplace AI training, versus 49% of men. Both groups named "concern" as their top emotional response to AI, but men rated curiosity, enthusiasm and excitement higher across the board.

Why it matters: Name recognition is a crude but telling proxy for who shapes the AI narrative — and the finding that a made-up executive is as "famous" as two of the field's best-known women says as much about media visibility as about the audience. For an industry whose talent pool is roughly 29% women, the report adds data to the debate over who gets heard, funded and quoted in AI.

Caveat: Recognition figures are self-reported survey answers. The headline 46% is the report's overall figure; the men-versus-women split for the fictional names is as reported by WIRED.

Sources: Shorenstein Center report (14 Oct 2026); Shorenstein Center announcement; WIRED (Kate Taylor, 14 Oct 2026)