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.
More broadly, women made up 22% of the C-suite in the technology, information and media sectors, according to a separate report in June from the World Economic Forum.
Overall, women held 27% of AI roles at AI companies versus 31% of AI roles at non-AI companies. If women continue to represent 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 to law enforcement, concerns are mounting that the industry’s lack of diversity may reinforce existing inequalities on a greater scale.
The technology can absorb biases embedded in the data used to train it and reproduce them in ways that influence who gets jobs, loans and opportunities — and even how people are treated by the criminal justice system. Biased text-to-image tools used to generate sketches of suspected offenders, for example, could contribute to wrongful convictions.
In the U.S., the world leader in AI technologies, 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.
Kishan writes for Bloomberg.
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