Adoption of OpenAI’s ChatGPT is widespread but primarily driven along gender and income.
An awning gap in use between high-end users (male, higher-wage workers) and slower adopters (female, lower-income workers) is at the core of a fascinating new survey of 18,000 workers by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
By the end of 2024, University of Chicago economist Anders Humlum and Emilie Vestergaard of the University of Copenhagen, who wrote a paper on the results, found women are 16% less likely than men in ChatGPT adoption. Women are likely to encounter more “adoption friction,” or aversion to AI because of a lack of training, researchers found, though they share some optimism around the technology.
They point to a 2024 survey by researchers at Norway’s Institute of Economics that found men were between 10% and 25% more likely than women to use ChatGPT regularly. That study found “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.
“I’m a labor economist studying how technological change affects employment and wages. ChatGPT marks the rise of generative AI, and we wanted to measure which workers have adopted this frontier tool to better understand its potential impact on the labor market,” Humlum said in an interview with PsyPost.
The survey, in collaboration with Statistics Denmark across 11 occupations between November 2023 and January 2024, honed in on jobs that experts consider “exposed” to ChatGPT — such as software developers, teachers, customer-service reps, journalists and marketing professionals. Results showed overall widespread use (41%), particularly among men.
Journalists and marketing professionals were most likely to use OpenAI’s flagship chatbot: 64% said they use it at work. Conversely, financial advisors and accountants had the lowest share of ChatGPT use, at a paltry 18%, ostensibly because they “handle sensitive information” in their jobs, the paper found.
What is puzzling is general AI reluctance among women who are “as optimistic as men about the time savings from ChatGPT.”
Though workers generally see productivity potential in ChatGPT regardless of their hands-on experiences with the tool, those who have not used ChatGPT so far have no plans to do so. Even in tasks where “never users” acknowledge ChatGPT could halve their working times, only 3% intend to use it within the next two weeks.
