The AI industry is booming. Women are getting left behind

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Women hold just a fraction of new AI jobs but are overrepresented in roles with high risk of AI disruption

There’s a common fear among people who work in Silicon Valley: snag one of the fast-growing, high-paying jobs in artificial intelligence, or get trapped in the “permanent underclass”, a phrase describing the fate of those who won’t have upward mobility in the age of AI.

The phrase usually describes a future in which AI automates human jobs. But for women in tech, it’s starting to look like the present.

“A lot of people say: ‘Oh, AI is lowering barriers, it’s equalizing the playing field for women,’” said Urvashi Batra, co-founder and CEO of Prioriwise, an AI platform for IT service providers. “I actually think it’s the opposite.”

Batra said people take her less seriously as the founder of an AI company than her male co-founder. When pitching investors, she and her co-founder have learned that they are more likely to get an investment if he does the pitching.

Women made up only about a quarter of new hires in AI roles in the last year, compared to 50% of new hires in non-AI roles, according to a recent report from LinkedIn. In executive roles, that number drops to just 13%. At the same time, LinkedIn’s research shows that women are more likely to work in roles with high exposure to AI disruption, like customer service, meaning they are also at higher risk for job loss due to AI.

AI jobs, whose postings have doubled since 2023, come with a salary premium, on average paying more than twice as much as roles that don’t involve working with AI, according to LinkedIn’s research. But women who do have jobs in AI are disproportionately concentrated in low-paying roles, like data annotators, said Sarah Steinberg, the head of global public policy partnerships at LinkedIn.

Across all AI occupations, men have $45,000 higher median pay than women, partly due to the types