OpenAI’s recent economic report reveals a shift in ChatGPT’s user demographics, indicating that women now constitute a larger portion of its user base than men. This development marks a change from the platform’s initial usage patterns and suggests a broader adoption across different demographic groups.
Initial estimates following ChatGPT’s launch indicated that approximately 80% of users were male. Data collected in June showed a marginal increase in usage among individuals with traditionally female names. The current report signals a more substantial shift, highlighting the growing engagement of women with the AI chatbot.
Ronnie Chatterji, OpenAI’s chief economist, attributes this shift towards gender balance to the expansion of ChatGPT’s user base beyond early adopters. Chatterji stated, “There’s been so much excitement about ChatGPT and how people can use it to do really practical things.” This suggests that the increasing awareness and accessibility of ChatGPT’s practical applications have contributed to its wider adoption among women.
The economic report is based on an analysis of 1.5 million conversations sampled from ChatGPT’s approximately 700 million weekly users. The study examined a subset of messages from logged-in users over the age of 18. It excluded users who had opted out of data collection or requested that their data not be used for training purposes. AI was employed to categorize the content of the messages, while researchers did not have access to individual chat logs.
The data reveals that 80% of ChatGPT usage falls into three primary categories: practical guidance, information search, and writing assistance. Coding and other specialized applications represent a smaller proportion of overall usage. This distribution indicates that users are primarily leveraging ChatGPT for everyday tasks and information retrieval.
OpenAI’s method for estimating gender mix involves analyzing user names and categorizing them as typically male, female, or uncertain. The report acknowledges that this approach provides a general indication of trends but is not a scientifically precise measure of gender. Despite this limitation, the shift in user demographics is evident. According to Similarweb, OpenAI’s ChatGPT is the most popular AI chatbot worldwide. It receives nearly 6 billion monthly desktop and mobile visits, which is approximately eight times more than Google’s Gemini and nine times more than the open-source Chinese app DeepSeek.
