AI tools used by English councils downplay women’s health issues, study finds

Artificial intelligence tools used by more than half of England’s councils are downplaying women’s physical and mental health issues and risk creating gender bias in care decisions, research has found.

The study found that when using Google’s AI tool “Gemma” to generate and summarise the same case notes, language such as “disabled”, “unable” and “complex” appeared significantly more often in descriptions of men than women.

The study, by the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), also found that similar care needs in women were more likely to be omitted or described in less serious terms.

Dr Sam Rickman, the lead author of the report and a researcher in LSE’s Care Policy and Evaluation Centre, said AI could result in “unequal care provision for women”.

“We know these models are being used very widely and what’s concerning is that we found very meaningful differences between measures of bias in different models,” he said. “Google’s model, in particular, downplays women’s physical and mental health needs in comparison to men’s.

“And because the amount of care you get is determined on the basis of perceived need, this could result in women receiving less care if biased models are used in practice. But we don’t actually know which models are being used at the moment.”

AI tools are increasingly being used by local authorities to ease the workload of overstretched social workers, although there is little information about which specific AI models are being used, how frequently and what impact this has on decision-making.

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Source: The Guardian, 11 August 2025