The AI industry is booming. Women are getting left behind — SkimNews
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- LinkedIn found women made up only about 25% of new hires in AI roles over the past year, compared with 50% in non-AI roles, and hold just 13% of executive positions in the field.
- AI job postings have doubled since 2023 and pay more than twice the average non-AI role, yet men earn $45,000 more in median pay across all AI occupations, partly because women are concentrated in lower-paying roles like data annotation.
- Urvashi Batra, co-founder of AI platform Prioriwise, said she and her male co-founder have learned investors are more likely to fund them when he does the pitching, because people take her less seriously as a female AI founder.
- Jayeeta Putatunda, an AI engineering lead at investment firm Turing, said a four-month maternity leave left her returning to entirely new AI frameworks and models, and that the field's breakneck pace — including 12-hour-day cultures — is a key way women get pushed out.
- Women in customer service and similar roles are more likely than men to hold jobs with high exposure to AI disruption, putting them at greater risk of job loss even as they remain underrepresented in the higher-paying AI roles being created.
- Companies including Accenture, Deloitte, IBM, and PayPal have agreed to multimillion-dollar settlements as the Department of Justice targets corporate DEI programs, making it harder for groups like Felicia Newhouse's AI Powered Women to win internal support for women-focused AI initiatives.
- Brenda Darden Wilkerson, president of AnitaB.org, called the trend a 'sort of backsliding,' while Newhouse warned the deeper risk is that a participation gap in AI becomes a lasting power gap over who controls the technology shaping the economy.
Why it matters: Because AI postings have doubled since 2023 and pay more than double the non-AI average, the 25% female share of new AI hires and $45,000 median pay gap lock women out of the fastest-rising wage premium in the economy — and the simultaneous DEI rollbacks at firms like Accenture, Deloitte, IBM, and PayPal strip away the institutional pipelines that had been trying to close that gap.
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