AI illuminating gender gaps: Why she strategizes and he chatters – Deseret News
Every male and female I know who are in a relationship of any kind, be it marriage, work or friendship, have pretty big differences between them in how they use AI. And almost always, women are puzzled by how the men interact with their generative artificial intelligence tool of choice, and the men are puzzled by how the women interact with AI.
In my own most prominent relationship with a man (my marriage), the difference is vast. He talks to and engages in conversation with ChatGPT while I am in a strictly text-only, purely business relationship with the software. For fear of revealing my weaknesses ahead of a robot takeover apocalypse situation. No, not really. It’s actually because I kind of get the ick when I hear ChatGPT “talk.” It feels like eating Velveeta. Almost real, but also, clearly, not.
I use ChatGPT like I used to use Google. Primarily to find recipes I can’t find anywhere else, check medical symptoms to make sure I’m not dying, and send photos of plants to get pruning advice.
My husband uses it to create websites and learn about astrophysics and probably split the atom — I don’t really know for sure but I do know that he is comfortable talking with it like it’s a close personal friend. And that is weird to me.
This very specific anecdotal evidence, it turns out, fits with a global trend.
The Wall Street Journal published a story digging into a recent study that found that significantly fewer women use AI than men.
“In one part of the study the authors found that women made up 42% of the roughly 200 million average monthly users at ChatGPT, 42.4% at Perplexity and 31.2% at Anthropic’s Claude,” the story states.
The gender gap widened even further when researchers examined smartphone AI usage. “Between May 2023 and November 2024, only 27.2% of total ChatGPT application downloads are estimated to have come from women. Similarly low shares of mobile downloads by women were seen on Anthropic’s Claude and Perplexity,” the story reads.
On the whole, the story explains, women are 20% less likely than men to use AI. To understand why this might be, I took to social media and asked users to explain how they use AI and how that use differs from the people of the opposite sex in their lives.
What surprised me was that not all women are hesitant and not all men are bullish on the technology.
One male user told me that the women in his life tend to take a more conversational approach, and the males tend to limit their communication. He said this might be because he lives in a rural area where AI adoption is not widespread, and men overall are skeptical of the technology.
A female user told me she uses it for parenting advice. She’ll explain to ChatGPT what happened and ask for feedback. “I get pretty good gentle advice, honestly,” she shared. “I appreciate the validation.” Others told me they use generative AI to get perspective on their romantic relationships. In fact, many female respondents say they use AI tools as therapists.
A teacher explained that she uses AI to draft emails to parents when she needs to be firm. “I tend to lose less sleep when I use AI than when I write the email myself.” Another teacher said she uses it to improve worksheets in her limited prep time.
Another female user said she uses it to create character art for the roleplaying games she’s recently gotten into and plays with others online.
These responses, largely from females, were far more creative and expansive than my own AI use. And I thought maybe they proved both The Wall Street Journal and its cited study wrong. But then I heard from Amy Anderson, who runs a tech company. She explained the differences she’s noticed in how men and women use AI in the workplace.
“I use AI tools to remove tasks from my to-do list,” she said. “Can it give me time to do other things? Can it organize my calendar and carry mental labor for me? Can I ask ChatGPT to make a carpool schedule for me or a grocery list or summarize the 7,000 emails I get from the schools my kids attend?”
Then she explained how the men she knows use it. “(They) tend to use AI also to free up time but it’s usually tied to different ends — the optimization of tasks for improved results. How can they do things better? How can they do more things with less effort but not for relief — more for improved results.”
Anderson concluded, “The women I know using AI are always trying to solve a problem and the men I know using these tools are always trying to validate themselves. The irony of all of this is that so much of the AI tech in the world is targeted towards men but goodness, when the tech world catches up and solves problems for women, so so much money awaits those entrepreneurs.”
The Wall Street Journal story highlights that the less women use generative AI, the more it exacerbates gender biases. So it’s on women to use the technology so the technology becomes more gender-neutral. As though any of us need one more thing added to our to-do list between our jobs and carpool and reading the 7,000 emails from the school.
But if the bright and creative women who shared their experiences with me taught me anything, it’s that AI, if used correctly, can make that to-do list a little shorter. Which is why I had it write this story.
Just kidding, I would never do that. But what I will have it do is create grocery lists and update my calendar and draft emails. Both to free up some of my time and help make AI a better tool for women.
But you’ll never catch me talking to it. Cause that’s weird.
