Tang Chuang, Li Shaobo Kevin, Hu Suming, Zeng Fue, Du Qianzhou
HSBC Business School, Peking University, Shenzhen 518055, China.
College of Business, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen 518055, China.
PNAS Nexus. 2025 Feb 11;4(2):pgae591. doi: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgae591. eCollection 2025 Feb.
The emergence of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT has substantially increased individuals' productivity. In this study, we adopt a difference-in-differences approach to analyze a large dataset of research preprints to systematically examine whether the advent of generative AI has distinct effects on the productivity of male and female academic researchers. We find that after the emergence of ChatGPT, the increase in the productivity of male researchers is 6.4% higher than that of female researchers, implying a widening of the productivity gap between them. We then conduct a survey about researchers' use of ChatGPT and find that male researchers use generative AI more frequently and experience higher efficiency improvement from its use than female researchers. Our findings show the unintended consequences of generative AI and point to the need for institutions to consider its differential effects on productivity to ensure fairness when evaluating faculty members.
ChatGPT等生成式人工智能工具的出现大幅提高了个人的生产力。在本研究中，我们采用双重差分法分析了一个大型研究预印本数据集，以系统地检验生成式人工智能的出现是否对男性和女性学术研究人员的生产力有不同影响。我们发现，ChatGPT出现后，男性研究人员生产力的提高比女性研究人员高6.4%，这意味着他们之间的生产力差距在扩大。然后，我们对研究人员使用ChatGPT的情况进行了一项调查，发现男性研究人员比女性研究人员更频繁地使用生成式人工智能，并且从使用中获得的效率提升更高。我们的研究结果显示了生成式人工智能的意外后果，并指出各机构在评估教职员工时需要考虑其对生产力的不同影响，以确保公平性。
