Women get only a quarter of new AI jobs as hiring surges

The gap starts at the hiring door

AI job postings have doubled since 2023. Yet women who do enter the field are disproportionately likely to land lower-paid work, such as data annotation, said Sarah Steinberg, LinkedIn’s head of global public policy partnerships. Across AI occupations, men’s median pay is $45,000 higher than women’s, partly because they hold different kinds of jobs.

The imbalance reaches beyond hiring. Urvashi Batra, co-founder and CEO of IT services vendor platform Prioriwise, says investors take her less seriously than her male colleague. At investor meetings, she says, the two noticed they were more likely to secure funding when he delivered the pitch.

Women hold about a third of technical jobs in the US, but research indicates they leave the industry at much higher rates than men, citing exclusionary workplaces and barriers to advancement. Brenda Darden Wilkerson, president of nonprofit AnitaB.org, which promotes women in technical careers, called the current trend a setback.

Keeping up has a cost

Jayeeta Putatunda, who leads an AI engineering team at investment firm Turing, says the field moves so quickly that staying current takes sustained effort. Women may be the only female engineer on a team, have to push harder to get their ideas heard, and struggle to find mentors—especially women mentors. Twelve-hour workdays to keep up are not unusual, she says.

After returning from four months of parental leave, Putatunda found new frameworks and model tiers had emerged. Catching up was difficult; supportive colleagues and a husband who shared childcare equally helped. Her account points to a retention problem that skill-building alone cannot solve: people need the time and support to keep pace.

Women in AI may also face hiring systems that reward familiarity. Wilkerson says companies hire quickly but still rely on existing referral networks and the same old screening criteria, leaving women less visible. Meanwhile, companies have rolled back diversity, equity and inclusion programs in recent years, reducing institutional routes into jobs and promotions.

Felicia Newhouse, founder of AI Powered Women, says the political climate has made it harder to press AI companies to support initiatives for women. She points to US Justice Department actions against corporations with diversity programs, arguing that the initiatives violate anti-discrimination laws. Accenture, Deloitte, IBM and PayPal agreed to pay multimillion-dollar sums in connection with those cases. Newhouse says it has become harder for organizations to approach companies under the AI Powered Women name, and for internal supporters to advance women-focused initiatives.

Access to the jobs is access to power

The figures describe more than an uneven hiring cycle. AI roles are among the fastest-growing and highest-paid, but women are entering them at lower rates, clustering in lower-paid positions, and facing conditions that make it harder to stay. I think the key question is not whether women can learn these tools; it is whether the industry’s hiring and working conditions give them a fair chance to build careers around them.

Newhouse’s concern is that a gap in participation becomes a gap in power. If women have less access to the jobs and fewer chances to stay in them, they will also have less influence over a technology shaping the economy.