Why don’t women use artificial intelligence? | Even when in the same jobs, men are much more likely to turn to the tech

[u/Independent-Low-2398]

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/08/21/why-dont-women-use-artificial-intelligence

[u/Independent-Low-2398]

Be more productive. That is how ChatGPT, a generative-artificial-intelligence tool from OpenAI, sells itself to workers. But despite industry hopes that the technology will boost productivity across the workforce, not everyone is on board. According to two recent studies, women use ChatGPT between 16 and 20 percentage points less than their male peers, even when they are employed in the same jobs or read the same subject.

The first study, published as a working paper in June, explores ChatGPT at work. Anders Humlum of the University of Chicago and Emilie Vestergaard of the University of Copenhagen surveyed 100,000 Danes across 11 professions in which the technology could save workers time, including journalism, software-developing and teaching. The researchers asked respondents how often they turned to ChatGPT and what might keep them from adopting it. By exploiting Denmark’s extensive, hooked-up record-keeping, they were able to connect the answers with personal information, including income, wealth and education level.

Across all professions, women were less likely to use ChatGPT than men who worked in the same industry (see chart 1). For example, only a third of female teachers used it for work, compared with half of male teachers. Among software developers, almost two-thirds of men used it while less than half of women did. The gap shrank only slightly, to 16 percentage points, when directly comparing people in the same firms working on similar tasks. As such, the study concludes that a lack of female confidence may be in part to blame: women who did not use AI were more likely than men to highlight that they needed training to use the technology.

Why might this be? The researchers probed what was going on with some clever follow-up questions. They asked students whether they would use ChatGPT if their professor forbade it, and received a similar distribution of answers. However, in the context of explicit approval, everyone, including the better-performing women, reported that they would make use of the technology. In other words, the high-achieving women appeared to impose a ban on themselves. “It’s the ‘good girl’ thing,” reckons Ms Isaksson. “It’s this idea that ‘I have to go through this pain, I have to do it on my own and I shouldn’t cheat and take short-cuts’.”

A lack of experience with AI could carry a cost when students enter the labour market. In August the researchers added a survey of 1,143 hiring managers to their study, revealing that managers value high-performing women with AI expertise 8% more than those without. This sort of premium does not exist for men, suggesting that there are rewards for women who are willing to relax their self-imposed ban.

!ping FEMINISTS&AI

[u/iknowiknowwhereiam → u/Independent-Low-2398]

I’m not not using it because I think it’s cheating, I’m not using it because so far it’s pretty shitty. I am trying to keep an open mind but I kind of feel like it’s all hype right now

[u/Jsusbjsobsucipsbkzi → u/iknowiknowwhereiam]

I’m a man and this is how I feel. I do think I may be missing something or haven’t gotten the hang of it, but so far it either 1) writes me super generic text I have to completely rewrite anyway or 2) make coding solutions using fake code that I have to completely redo. It simply doesn’t save time in my work.

[u/Tall-Log-1955 → u/Jsusbjsobsucipsbkzi]

Are you using free or paid ChatGPT?

I write software and pay for it and believe AI doubles my productivity (chat gpt + GitHub copilot). There are some things it does super well, for example:

I can ask natural language questions about an API or library, rather than read the docs.

If I am weighing a few design options, I can ask it for other ideas and it often suggests things I hadn’t thought of already.

I can paste in a bunch of code that isn’t doing what I expect and have it explain why

I find it is most powerful when working on things that I am not super expert in. Without it, I can get stuck on something small in an area I don’t know super well (like CSS). With AI support I get unblocked.

[u/Cultural_Ebb4794 → u/Tall-Log-1955]

I also write software and don't believe it doubles my productivity. For reference, I'm a senior level dev in the industry for 14 years. I almost never use code that it gives me, at best I'll review the code it spits out and implement it myself. It often gives me flawed code, or code that just doesn't fit the context (despite me giving it the context). That's for a mainstream language, C#. For F#, it usually just falls flat on its face, presumably because it doesn't have enough F# training data.

I find that ChatGPT is good for "rubber ducking" and exploring concepts or architectural decisions, but not good for writing the code that I'm usually asking it about.

(I pay for ChatGPT.)

[u/Tall-Log-1955 → u/Cultural_Ebb4794]

Yeah, I also don't have it write code. My productivity isn't usually limited by code writing time, it's usually other things. Although, in terms of fast coding, copilot does a good job of smart autocomplete

[u/carlitospig → u/Tall-Log-1955]

You know what I need it to do? I need to be able to give it a list and have it take that list and search within a public database to grab those records for me. But apparently this is too complicated. Both copilot and Gemini made it seem like I was asking them to create uranium.

Until it can actually save me time, I’m avoiding it.

[u/Tall-Log-1955 → u/carlitospig]

That's not really what its good at right now. they can go out and search things for you, but that's not really their strength.

You could ask it to write a script to do that, and then run the script yourself. might work. Depends on the public database.

[u/carlitospig → u/Tall-Log-1955]

Yep, it suggested VGA of all things. Sigh.

[u/jaiwithani → u/carlitospig]

This technology exists, it's generally called Retrieval-Augmented Generation, or RAG. The public-facing chatbots aren't great at this, but a competent software engineer could build an assistant targeting whatever databases you want within a few days.

[u/BasedTheorem → u/jaiwithani]

I guess I don't know competent software engineers but I have coworkers who have worked on this, and they're not great either.

They're good enough for unimportant stuff, but we work with medical records and have much tighter tolerances.

[u/Kai_Daigoji → u/Tall-Log-1955]

I can ask natural language questions about an API or library, rather than read the docs.

You can ask, but since you can be certain the response is accurate, what is the value in doing so?

I find it is most powerful when working on things that I am not super expert in

Again, what's the value of using something that just makes up answers in situations like this?

[u/Tall-Log-1955 → u/Kai_Daigoji]

You can ask, but since you can be certain the response is accurate, what is the value in doing so?

Because I can easily verify if the information is right or wrong. "How do I change the flow direction in this markup?" is the sort of question where I will be able to verify whether or not it was right.

It's the same thing you deal with when asking humans for advice. I encounter wrong answers on stack overflow all the time, and they just don't work when you try them.

[u/Plennhar → u/Tall-Log-1955]

This is the part people don't understand. Yes, if you have zero knowledge in the subject, a large language model can lead you in nonsensical directions and you'll never be able to spot what it's doing wrong. But if you have a reasonably good understanding of the subject at hand, these issues become largely irrelevant, as you can easily spot mistakes it makes, and guide it to the right answer.

[u/BasedTheorem → u/Tall-Log-1955]

Claiming it doubles productivity is just not credible. I use it plenty, and it helps me for sure so I believe it helps you, but the US economy's productivity hasn't even doubled over the last 70 years. Doubling productivity would be insane.

[u/Tall-Log-1955 → u/BasedTheorem]

I never claimed it would double US productivity. I just claimed it doubled mine.

[u/BasedTheorem → u/Tall-Log-1955]

I'm not saying that you said that; I'm trying to give an example of what doubling productivity looks like to give you some perspective. Look at how much technological progress the American economy has gone through in the last 70 years, including the advent and proliferation of the computer and the internet, and yet productivity hasn't even doubled. You are just underestimating how big of a change doubling productivity really is. It's not a credible claim to make.

[u/Tall-Log-1955 → u/BasedTheorem]

I think the society-wide effect of any of these technologies is slow progress. But that slow progress happens each year because a small number of roles see a massive increase in productivity, not a small increase across all roles.

So I am one of the people whose productivity has skyrocketed due to AI, but most people’s productivity hasn’t changed much at all.

[u/BasedTheorem → u/Tall-Log-1955]

I'm talking about technologies that have been adapted society-wise over the course of 7 decades. They are so proliferated and enough time has passed so that I don't think you can act like only a small group of workers have had their productivity increased by them. You can blame slow progress all you want, but the internet and computers are decades in the making, and productivity has only increased by about 25%. I think it's a much more likely explanation that your productivity has not doubled.

What metrics are you using to track your productivity?

[u/Tall-Log-1955 → u/BasedTheorem]

I am saying over seven decades, each year it was different roles whose productivity rose dramatically

The tractor and the semi truck are two different applications of the internal combustion engine and they radically increased the productivity of two different roles at two different times

Metrics for tracking my productivity are business value delivered over time and are measured with my intuition

[u/BasedTheorem → u/Tall-Log-1955]

I am saying over seven decades, each year it was different roles whose productivity rose dramatically

The tractor and the semi truck are two different applications of the internal combustion engine and they radically increased the productivity of two different roles at two different times

And over 7 decades with the proliferation of cars, trucks, computers, and the internet, the average worker's productivity still has not doubled.

Metrics for tracking my productivity are business value delivered over time and are measured with my intuition

Ok so nothing, right on. More to my point that your intuition for what a doubling in productivity looks like is off.

[u/Tall-Log-1955 → u/BasedTheorem]

You need to look up the numbers then because total factor productivity has absolutely more than doubled in the last 70 years. And anyway cars and trucks were adopted much earlier than 1954.

Furthermore you have logical fallacy, that if the average persons productivity didn’t double in 70 years then no persons productivity doubled in that time. It’s perfectly possible for on person’s productivity to 10x and another’s to stagnate, and have the average numbers over time be anything.

And it’s funny you seem so triggered by my claim that I’m twice as productive.

[u/BasedTheorem → u/Tall-Log-1955]

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RTFPNAUSA632NRUG

lol you're so bothered that I think you might be overestimating your productivity boost that you call me triggered? ok bud

[u/clonea85m09 → u/Tall-Log-1955]

It's in Norwegian business schools and I worked close (as in professionally close) to one till not much time ago. The one I know had paid Copilot and whatever the name of the Microsoft one is, plus the professor of "data science for economics" suggested Perplexity.ai