Anthropic's recent study on AI usage in social science research highlights significant gender disparities in the adoption of AI coding agents. The study found that researchers with typically male names use these tools more than twice as often as those with typically female names, even within the same disciplines and career levels. General AI usage is fairly even across groups, but coding agents show stark disparities. 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. Researchers are bullish on their own productivity but skeptical about their field. Respondents are optimistic about AI's effect on their own paper output: 88 percent rate it above 5 on a 10-point scale, and half rate it at 8 or higher. Coding agent users are even more optimistic than others. Researchers rate AI's impact on their own productivity much higher than its impact on their field. The gap grows with the number of AI use cases adopted. Coding agent users are the most optimistic about personal productivity but remain skeptical about broader effects. But 70 percent of respondents are more upbeat about their own productivity than about AI's impact on the social sciences as a whole. The authors suspect researchers worry that more papers could overload the peer review system, intensify competition for attention, and worsen existing problems like selective reporting and risk-averse, incremental research. *Source: [thedecoder](https://the-decoder.com/anthropic-study-finds-men-use-ai-coding-agents-more-than-twice-as-often-as-women-in-social-science-research/)*