Do AI coding agents widen the gender gap in science?
anthropic studied social scientists and found men use coding agents 2x more than women. this signals that ai tools could entrench inequality in research.
anthropic surveyed social scientists to measure the impact of ai tools like claude code, revealing a stark gender gap where researchers with male names use coding agents over twice as often as those with female names. the study of 2,400 researchers showed economists lead adoption at 39 percent while phd students and postdocs use the tools significantly more than full professors. while 88 percent of researchers expect ai to boost their personal paper output, 70 percent worry the flood of low-effort publications will degrade the entire field. systemic adoption disparities suggest ai could accelerate existing inequalities and overwhelm peer review systems with ai-generated content.