Pew: 50 Percent of Men and 47 Percent of Women Have Used a Chatbot - but Daily Use Still Splits 27 to 20

Two years ago, using an AI chatbot was a gendered behavior in America. Pew Research Center's newest short read, published October 16, says that era is over: 50 percent of men and 47 percent of women now say they have ever used an AI chatbot, a statistical tie that closes the 11-point gap Pew recorded in 2024. ChatGPT, the most-used product, posts identical adoption on both sides of the divide at 44 percent.

The topline comes with an asterisk Pew itself flags: the 2024 question was worded differently and the survey sample changed, so the correct reading is a direction, not a clean trend line. The underlying data was also collected in February, in a survey of 5,119 US adults fielded February 17-23, and repackaged this month as a focused gender analysis rather than new fieldwork.

Parity in access has not produced parity in habit. Men are meaningfully more likely to use chatbots every day, 27 percent versus 20 percent, and more likely to use several brands beyond ChatGPT - Copilot, for example, sits at 22 percent of men versus 13 percent of women. Women, meanwhile, are slightly more likely to own a smartwatch, 40 percent versus 34 percent, and slightly more likely to use chatbots for emotional support or advice, 11 percent versus 8 percent.

The perception gaps are wider than the usage gaps. Among chatbot users, 35 percent of men say the tools help their productivity against 25 percent of women. Only 15 percent of women describe themselves as extremely or very confident using chatbots, compared with 22 percent of men. Self-reported confidence is not competence, but it shapes who experiments, who builds workflows and who captures the gains of a technology that rewards iteration.

The pattern matters because the first-order adoption story - who has access - has largely been resolved in under three years, and what is left is a second-order story about depth of use. The survey establishes differences in attitudes and habits; it does not establish why they exist. Possible explanations run from task mix and workplace training to product design and simple differences in what users want from the tools, and Pew draws no conclusion.

For the industry, the finding cuts against the assumption that growth now depends on winning over non-users. Half the country has already touched a chatbot, men and women at nearly identical rates, and the remaining upside is in turning occasional use into daily use - the metric where a seven-point gender gap persists and where AI-native products are still, by the numbers, built mostly around one half of the market's habits.