AI jobs are multiplying, and they pay well. Women are getting a much smaller share of them. According to Hacker News, which surfaced new LinkedIn research, women made up only about a quarter of new hires in AI roles over the past year. In non-AI roles, they made up half. At the executive level, the figure falls to 13%.
This matters because AI jobs aren’t a niche anymore. LinkedIn says AI job postings have doubled since 2023, and these roles pay more than twice as much on average as jobs that don’t involve AI. If one group keeps getting shut out of the fastest-growing part of the economy, the pay gap compounds. Advocates warn it could become the widest gender pay gap in generations.
Several comforting stories keep circulating about why this will fix itself. The data says otherwise.
Myth 1: AI levels the playing field
The optimistic version says AI tools lower barriers, so anyone can build anything. Urvashi Batra, co-founder and CEO of Prioriwise, isn’t buying it. “I actually think it’s the opposite,” she said.
Batra says people take her less seriously than her male co-founder. When they pitch investors, they’ve learned they’re more likely to get funded if he does the talking. Cheaper tools don’t help much when the people controlling the money still decide based on who’s standing at the front of the room.
Myth 2: A brand-new field is automatically a meritocracy
In theory, nobody has ten years of experience with a model released last year, so everyone should start even. In practice, companies hire at breakneck speed through the same old channels.
“They’re finding people through the same networks, the same referrals, the same filters that they’ve always used,” said Brenda Darden Wilkerson, president of AnitaB.org. When hiring is rushed, people fall back on familiar signals, and familiar signals favor the people already inside.
Myth 3: Women in AI are just a smaller slice of the same pie
It’s worse than that. LinkedIn’s Sarah Steinberg says women in AI cluster in lower-paid roles like data annotation. Across all AI occupations, men earn a median of $45,000 more than women.
There’s also a double hit. LinkedIn’s research shows women are more likely to hold jobs heavily exposed to AI disruption, like customer service. They’re underrepresented in the jobs AI creates and overrepresented in the jobs AI threatens.
Myth 4: It’s a pipeline or interest problem
Jayeeta Putatunda, an AI engineering lead at Turing, describes a culture where 12-hour days are common just to keep pace. She took four months of maternity leave and came back to “completely different frameworks and levels of models.”
She caught up only because of supportive co-workers and a husband who split childcare equally. Her diagnosis is blunt: women “don’t lack the interest or ability to keep up. They may lack the infrastructure that makes keeping up possible.” When a field’s release cycle is shorter than a parental leave, that becomes a structural filter, not a personal failing.
Myth 5: Diversity programs will catch the slack
That safety net is shrinking. Companies have scaled back DEI programs under political pressure, and the Department of Justice has gone after corporate DEI initiatives as alleged discrimination. Accenture, Deloitte, IBM and PayPal have agreed to multimillion-dollar settlements. Felicia Newhouse, founder of AI Powered Women, says it’s getting harder to win corporate support for anything aimed specifically at women.
What actually works
The truth is less comfortable: the gap is widening on its own, and the usual fixes are being taken away. For AI teams and business leaders, the practical moves don’t require a DEI label:
- Widen your sourcing. Referral-only hiring copies your existing network. Add structured, skills-based assessments.
- Build re-entry ramps. Give anyone coming back from leave a defined catch-up period with time set aside for learning.
- Audit role distribution and pay. If your annotators are mostly women and your research engineers mostly men, you have a pay gap baked into how the org is designed.
- Treat sustainable pace as a retention strategy. Constant 12-hour days burn out talent of every gender.
AI is shaping how the economy will run for decades. If women aren’t building it, the products will show it. You can find the full reporting at the original source.