Women Capture Only 26% of AI Jobs as Gender Gap in Tech Widens, LinkedIn Data Shows

Women are missing out on the AI jobs boom

Why it matters: These jobs are some of the fastest-growing and highest-paying in the country right now -- at a time when the overall labor market is pretty sluggish -- and the report shows women are getting left behind. By the numbers: Men landed 74%, and women 26%, of the new hires for AI roles in 2025. * The highest-paying roles typically have higher percentages of men. * To get hiring information, the platform looked at user, or member, profiles. For data on compensation it analyzed job listings. Zoom in: An increasingly popular job is called "member of technical staff," a technical role common in AI labs that often sits at the intersection of advanced research and full-stack engineering. * 82% of new hires to these roles went to men in 2025. And this year, median listed pay is $223,000. * The data annotator job, meanwhile, with a median pay of $51,000, is roughly split 50/50 between men and women. Between the lines: The data confirms what our eyes have been telling us all along. Most of the public faces of the AI buildout have been men. Yes, but: The AI sector might make up a huge and growing part of the economy, but the jobs themselves are just a small sliver of the labor market. The bottom line: Women have long been underrepresented in the tech industry, particularly in leadership and technical roles. The AI boom is widening the divide.

LinkedIn Says Women Hold Just 13 Percent of Top AI Roles. That's Becoming a Business Risk

Artificial intelligence is reshaping nearly every corner of the workplace. Companies are experimenting with tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, Perplexity, and others. Leaders are trying to understand which jobs AI will change, which skills employees will need, and where the technology can create new efficiencies. But while we spend so much time debating what AI can do, there's another question that many business leaders are ignoring. Who gets to decide what AI could or should do? LinkedIn's new "Triple Penalty" report suggests there is a significant gap in who is getting that opportunity. The company looked at 27 countries and found that women hold just 13 percent of executive AI roles at AI companies. Furthermore, the report showed that women make up only 20 percent of "head of AI" hires and 26 percent of "director of AI" hires. This gender gap extends far beyond senior-level roles. Women made up just 26 percent of new AI hires in 2025, a disparity that begins early and steepens at every stage of the career ladder. At AI companies specifically, women hold 29 percent of entry-level positions, but that representation thins to only 21 percent at the vice president level and collapses to just 13 percent in the C-suite. "The steepest drop-off happens at the final step into the C-suite," said Sarah Steinberg, LinkedIn's head of global public policy partnerships. "But focusing only on that last rung misses the larger problem. Women are underrepresented before they even get on the AI ladder. This is not only a promotion problem at the top. It is a hiring, training, advancement, and leadership pipeline problem from the very beginning." If companies wait until they're choosing their next generation of AI executives to think about representation, they're already too late.