Anthropic study finds men use AI coding agents more than twice as often as women in social science research

Anthropic has studied how social scientists use AI and found that far more men than women use coding agents, AI tools like Claude Code that write program code automatically.

Researchers with typically male names use these tools more than twice as often as those with typically female names. The gap holds even within the same disciplines and career levels.

Differences in AI and coding agent adoption by career stage, gender, and university rank. General AI usage is fairly even across groups, but coding agents show stark disparities. | Image: Anthropic

Economists lead in coding agent adoption at 39 percent, while education researchers sit at the bottom with just four percent. PhD students and postdocs use coding AI far more than professors, and researchers at top-25 universities use the tools 40 percent more often than their peers. The dominant use case is code generation for data analysis, at 97 percent. Only a third use AI for writing text.

Code generation is the top use case at 97 percent of coding agent users. Only 54 percent of coding agent users and 30 percent of other AI users draft text. Economists are the most versatile AI users, with 50 percent also using it for writing. | Image: Anthropic