An open quantum system (i.e., one that interacts with its environment) is almost always entangled with its environment; it is therefore usually not attributed a wave function but only a reduced density matrix ρ. Nevertheless, there is a precise way of attributing to it a wave function ψ1, called its conditional wave function, which is a random wave function of the system whose probability distribution µ1 depends on the entangled wave function ψ ∈ H1 ⊗ H2 in the Hilbert space of system and environment together. We prove several universality (or typicality) results about µ1; they show that if the environment is sufficiently large then µ1 does not depend much on the details of ψ and is approximately given by one of the so-called GAP measures. Specifically, for most entangled states ψ with given reduced density matrix ρ1, µ1 is close to GAP (ρ1). We also show that, if the coupling between the system and the environment is weak, then for most entangled states ψ from a microcanonical subspace corresponding to energies in a narrow interval [E, E + δE] (and most bases of H2), µ1 is close to GAP (ρβ) with ρβ the canonical density matrix on H1 at inverse temperature β = β(E). This provides the mathematical justification of the claim that GAP (ρβ) is the thermal equilibrium distribution of ψ1.