According to OpenAI, women now make up more than half of the weekly active users of ChatGPT — a dramatic turnaround from its male-dominated early adopter days. The discovery is included in a 63-page research paper about anonymized, consumer-plan usage and provides a more detailed look at who uses ChatGPT — and why.
The report also estimates that 700 million people, or about one in 10 adults worldwide, utilize ChatGPT every week. And though work remains a major use case, most activity isn’t job-related: 73 percent of all chats are personal, up from 53 percent last year, underscoring how the chatbot has turned from office helper to everyday assistant.
A Turn Away From Early Adopters
Early surveys from groups such as the Pew Research Center found that men were more willing to experiment with generative AI tools, especially in the first year of ChatGPT’s release. The balance has flipped among weekly active users, according to new data from OpenAI; now women are in the majority. (The researchers deduced gender from “typically female first names,” a stand-in with substantial caveats, but the directional shift is hard to ignore.
The user base is also quite young: 46 percent of messages in the sample were sent by people between 18 and 25. That bias may account for the consumer leaning, as younger users are in the habit of relying on ChatGPT for study help, travel advice and life admin. OpenAI notes fast growth in both genders and countries, reflecting how AI has gone truly mainstream beyond tech bro circles.
What People Really Ask ChatGPT
Three issues keep coming up: practical tips, the search for meaning and writing. They make up 78 percent of chats, according to OpenAI. Work-oriented writing tasks like draft emails, reports and summaries lead — and this mirrors academic research that finds big productivity benefits from routine writing.
In contrast, code is a minority use case on ChatGPT itself, accounting for 4.2% of messages in the dataset. That could be indicative of developers preferring specialized tools such as GitHub’s Copilot, variants like the coding Claude and agentic IDEs that directly plug into workflows. Another surprise: don’t panic — “self-expression” uses (chitchat, playing make believe and personal reflection) are quite low, a useful data point given fears of AI-human interactions getting too intimate.
How OpenAI Counted — and What It Didn’t
The study includes consumer access tiers — Free, Plus and Pro over a time frame from May 2024 to June 2025, and the analysis does not include enterprise and education plans, which may have more on-the-job usage. OpenAI insists that researchers never read user messages; rather, they processed content patterns and metadata at scale.
Gender estimates were calculated from first-name heuristics, and can misclassify who are also do not represent nonbinary identities or cultural naming variations. The age range and consumer-only sample might result in a bias toward student and recreational use. These caveats don’t undercut the headline trends, but they do frame them: The “women are a majority” finding applies to weekly active consumer users, not necessarily all of the ChatGPT ecosystem.
Why the Gender Flip Matters
Designing for the user base that actually exists matters. A female majority among weekly active users over time could help guide product features toward everyday decision support — meal planning, budgeting templates, health information browsing and parenting logistics — while expanding ideas of safety and evaluation. It also sets the standard for cultural sensitivity, inclusion and bias testing in languages and communities where women are most engaged.
Economically, the paper—written with OpenAI’s chief economist Aaron Chatterji as well as Tom Cunningham and Harvard’s David Deming—claims ChatGPT’s greatest service for now is decision support. Despite that, with personal use increasing faster than professional use, the consumer welfare benefits could be greater than enterprise productivity alone implies. The lesson for brands and public agencies is the same: to optimize for AI-native information journeys that begin with a conversational inquiry — not a search box.
The Bottom Line
The center of gravity for ChatGPT is moving: More women are using it each week, most conversations are personal and writing remains the marquee skill.
The numbers are not a perfect census — the methods have limitations — but the trend is clear. Generative AI is emerging as a general purpose partner for every day decisions, not just a coder’s assistant or an office helper.
