AI's fast-growing, lucrative jobs leaving women behind across the globe

By Saijel Kishan

 

As artificial intelligence creates some of the fastest-growing and most-lucrative jobs globally, women are underrepresented in roles from the C-suite to rank-and-file positions at AI companies, according to a report from LinkedIn Corp.

 

Women with AI backgrounds accounted for just 13% of executive positions in the industry, compared with about 19% in non-AI sectors, according to a LinkedIn analysis of roughly 15,000 companies in 27 countries. 

 

Overall, women made up 27% of AI roles at AI companies versus 31% of AI roles at non-AI companies. If women continue to hold a disproportionately small share of AI roles, they stand to miss out on long-term economic mobility and decision-making power, said Sarah Steinberg, head of global public policy partnerships at LinkedIn.

 

“The AI economy risks being shaped without the perspectives and talent of half the workforce,” she said in an email.  

 

As AI becomes embedded in everything from hiring and lending to healthcare and law enforcement, concerns are growing that a lack of diversity in the industry may reinforce existing inequalities on a far greater scale. The technology can absorb biases in the data used to train it and reproduce them in ways that shape who gets jobs, loans, services and opportunities — or even how people are treated by the criminal justice system. Biased text-to-image tools used to create sketches of suspected offenders, for example, could contribute to wrongful convictions.

 

In the US, the world leader in AI technology, AI job postings doubled in recent years and the typical role pays more than twice as much as a non-AI role, according to the report by LinkedIn’s Economic Graph Research Institute. Among women in top AI positions are Daniela Amodei, a co-founder of Anthropic PBC, and AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li of World Labs.