Scientist Says That ChatGPT Has a "Staggering" Gender Problem

As popular as ChatGPT has become, it apparently has a major gender problem.

In an interview with PsyPost, University of Chicago economist Anders Humlum explained that in his research, he's encountered a "staggering gender gap in the adoption of ChatGPT."

At the end of last year, Humlum and his colleague Emilie Vestergaard of the University of Copenhagen revealed in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that women were 16 percentage points behind men in ChatGPT adoption.

This trend was evident, the economist told PsyPost, "even among workers in the same jobs handling similar job tasks." Among the eleven "exposed" occupations they assessed — from software developers to teachers and legal professionals to customer service reps — journalists and marketing professionals were the most likely to use OpenAI's flagship chatbot, with roughly 64 percent attesting that they use it for work.

Curiously, financial advisors and accountants had the lowest share of ChatGPT use, weighing in at just 18 percent of workers in those fields who said they use it for work. That could be because, as the paper notes, they "handle sensitive information" as part of their daily duties.

Across the occupations surveyed, however, women were always behind men on adoption rates. Only about 62 percent of female journalists and marketers reported that they use ChatGPT for work — and the disparity was greater for women who work in financial advising, with fewer than 10 percent saying they had used it on the job.

So what's behind the gender gap in ChatGPT adoption? To put it frankly, the researchers haven't quite figured that bit out.

As Humlum and Vestergaard noted in their paper, women are "about as optimistic as men about the time savings from ChatGPT," and seem to even save a bit more time than their male counterparts in the workplace when they do use it. There's some evidence that women have more "adoption friction" — aversion, basically  — to AI due to a lack of training with the tech, and women were more likely than men to say they "do not know how" to use ChatGPT.

The researchers pointed to another 2024 survey that looked into student ChatGPT usage in Norway for potential answers. In the first half of that study, researchers at Norway's Institute of Economics found that of the more than 500 students they surveyed, men were between 10 and 25 percentage points more likely than women to use ChatGPT regularly.

Overall, that Norwegian study found that "female students use ChatGPT much less, are less proficient at writing ChatGPT prompts, and are more sensitive to bans on using ChatGPT," Humlum and Vestergaard wrote. While their Nordic counterparts didn't have any hard-and-fast explanations for that gender gap, both studies documenting the trend make it seem pretty legit.

As he told PsyPost, Humlum is most interested in figuring out "how generative AI is reshaping labor markets" — but this finding was, nevertheless, "a big surprise for us."

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