Anthropic Study: Men Use AI Coding Agents 2x More Than Women

A new study from Anthropic reveals that men use AI coding agents more than twice as often as women in social science research. This includes tools like Claude Code, which automatically write program code. What's interesting is that this gap persists even within the same academic fields and career stages. Economists are leading the adoption of coding agents at 39 percent, while education researchers are at the bottom with four percent. PhD students and postdocs use coding AI significantly more than professors. Researchers at top-25 universities also use these tools 40 percent more often than their peers. The dominant use for these AI tools is code generation for data analysis, accounting for 97 percent of use. Only a third of researchers use AI for writing text. Here's the thing: while 88 percent of respondents are optimistic about AI's effect on their own paper output, 70 percent are more upbeat about their own productivity than about AI's overall impact on the social sciences. This suggests a concern that more papers could strain the peer review system and intensify competition. This matters because it highlights a potential imbalance in AI adoption and a broader concern about its impact on academic research.