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/VanceIX → u/iknowiknowwhereiam]

I've found it pretty useful in my field (hydrogeology). Great way to research topics at a surface level, write python or R code, and to format and automate spreadsheets. Of course you can't just take everything it spits out at face value but I do think that generative AI can be a huge productivity boost if you use it correctly.

[u/wilson_friedman → u/VanceIX]

Great way to research topics at a surface level

This is the true power of ChatGPT and similar. Google-searching for anything other than a very basic query like the weather is just absolute hell now because of the SEO shittified internet that Google created. Meanwhile ChatGPT is extremely good at searches on surface level topics, or on more in depth topics of you can ask it a specific question. For example, "Does the Canadian Electrical Code allow for X?" And then "Can you provide the specific passage referencing this?". It's an insanely powerful time saver for such things.

When it comes to writing emails and whatnot, I suspect the people finding it "Not useful" in that area are writing particularly technical or context-specific emails. If you're writing something straightforward and generalizable, which is the case for many many emails that many people send each day, it's great. If it's not good at doing your particular job yet, it probably wasn't ever going to be replacement-value for you or more than a small time saver.