ChatGPT’s gender gap vanishes as 3 in 4 chats are just daily tasks

The stereotype of the AI early adopter—young, male, and coding in a basement—is officially dead. The largest study of ChatGPT usage ever conducted, drawing on a privacy-preserving analysis of 1.5 million conversations, reveals that women now make up a majority of users. By July 2025, 52% of classified user names were feminine, a dramatic leap from 37% in January 2024. The research, an NBER working paper from OpenAI’s team and Harvard economist David Deming, also found adoption in the lowest-income countries growing at over four times the rate of the richest ones.

But here’s the part that might deflate the AI hype bubble: three-quarters of all chats are profoundly mundane. People are asking for practical advice, hunting for information, and drafting text. Writing dominates work-related use, while coding and creative self-expression remain surprisingly niche activities. The researchers sliced the 700-million-weekly-active-user base into three behavioral buckets: Asking (49% of messages), Doing (40%), and Expressing (11%). People value the model as an advisor more than a task rabbit.

The economic signal is messy but real. About 30% of consumer usage is work-related, creating clear productivity value, especially in knowledge-intensive jobs. The other 70% is personal—decision support, planning, learning—generating a kind of consumer surplus that GDP figures completely miss. The study notes that user cohorts actually deepen their engagement over time as they discover new use cases and models improve. No plateau in sight.

David Deming’s involvement adds academic heft, but the core tension remains unresolved. If most usage looks like a smarter Google and a writing coach, the revolutionary economic transformation narrative needs a rethink. The value is there, clearly. It’s just quieter than the headlines suggest—embedded in everyday decisions rather than flashy automation. What the paper doesn’t answer is whether this pattern holds as agentic capabilities roll out, or if we’re just watching the calm before a much weirder storm.