Women have always self-edited. Now they're using ChatGPT to do it

Women have faced judgement for years on their physical appearance at work.

• Now that so much of work takes place in inboxes, Slack and Teams messages, that burden has shifted form — and text can be just as fraught.

What they're saying: "I come from the U.K., so my style of communication is sometimes very different from how Californians communicate," Alice Chan, a San Francisco marketing professional, told Axios. "I have been told sometimes that I'm too direct."

• Chan says she still writes emails and other messages herself, but then drops the text into ChatGPT and asks how it might be received.

"I love using AI for vendor negotiations," Susannah Shattuck, head of product for Credo AI, told Axios in an email. "I'll ask Claude to review and revise my counteroffer — and almost always, I find that it pushes me to be a tougher negotiator."

• "I want to be able to set my tone," Angela Tran, account executive at Astrsk PR, told Axios. Tran says she runs her emails and sometimes even her Slack messages through AI. "I don't want to come off as too pushy," she says.
• Tran also uses Grammarly's AI tone detector tool to determine how her messages might sound to others.

Zoom out: The emotional toll of self-editing at work is real. Women spend significant energy calibrating their tone, a burden less often felt by their male peers.

• "I wish I didn't have to do it, but it's working," consultant Jennifer Borchardt told Axios about running her communications through ChatGPT and Claude to help them sound more "conciliatory," but also more confident.
• Borchardt says that since she's been massaging her words with AI, she's getting faster, more positive and more constructive responses to her messages. 

By the numbers: Women say they feel pressured to use a "work voice," according to a survey from Preply, a corporate communications platform.

• 82% of respondents said they change their communication style for the workplace.
• One in six women said they've been told to change their tone at work.

Zoom in: Women say they're trying to find a middle ground that feels comfortable but also checks all the boxes of "invisible corporate expectations," Kate Mason, author of the new book "Powerfully Likeable: A Woman's Guide to Effective Communication," told Axios.

• Women are either told they're too abrupt or that they need more "executive presence," Mason said.

• "There's definitely an empowering aspect to having an in-your-pocket adviser like ChatGPT," Mason said.

The other side: Mason says women use AI in workplace communications for the same reason men do: to sound knowledgeable quickly. But she doesn't see it as a cure-all.

• "Anyone using AI as their primary mode of writing risks not only losing their own voice and sense of self in their communication, but also risks atrophying their own logic, insights and thinking," says Mason.
• "If you outsource all text to a machine, you're not learning how you might want to respond in real life, which I think is a lost opportunity to practice."

Between the lines: Sometimes the same message could be interpreted as negatively aggressive or positively assertive based on who's reading it, Borchardt says.

• She's been experimenting with what she calls "hyper-personalizing" her communications.
• She drafts emails, drops them into ChatGPT with the recipient's LinkedIn profile and bio, and asks for a rewrite tailored to that person.

What we're watching: Younger women might be bucking the trend of policing their own tones.

• "They have less deference and are less likely to apologize than their predecessors," Mason says.
• "My hope is that they will continue to find modes of communication which serve themselves and their colleagues, while at the same time, not having to perform outdated versions of femininity."