The potential for artificial intelligence to profoundly disrupt life and work has prompted governments to consider how best to regulate the technology. Against this backdrop, this paper examines the gender gap in attitudes toward AI, with a focus on how gender-based differences in risk-taking drive support for AI's adoption and regulation. Analyzing survey data from approximately 3,000 respondents across Canada and the United States, we show that women are more skeptical than men of AI's economic benefits, and more likely to emphasize its economic risks such as job displacement. Our analysis identifies two key drivers behind this gender gap: women's higher levels of general risk aversion and higher exposure to AI-related risks. To establish a causal relationship between risk and AI attitudes, we further show experimentally that as the perceived benefits of AI become more uncertain, women's support for companies adopting AI falls more sharply than men's, and their support for government intervention against AI increases. Considering technology's capacity to reinforce gender inequalities, we conclude that AI policies and regulations that fail to incorporate women's perspectives risk perpetuating these disparities in the workplace and society.