Are Women Being Left Out of the AI Hiring Boom?

Here's the short version: yes. New LinkedIn data released this week shows women made just 26% of the hires into AI jobs in the U.S. last year, compared to 50% of hires into everything else. The roles are booming and they pay almost triple — about $177,000 on average, versus roughly $80,000 for non-AI work — and women are watching most of that upside go to men.

I know that stat can land like a gut punch, especially if you've been quietly wondering whether you're "behind" on AI. You're not behind. The system is built a little sideways, and the data finally says so out loud.

Are women being left out of the AI hiring boom?

Yes, and the gap is wide: LinkedIn's newest research shows women make up just 26% of AI hires versus 50% of hires everywhere else, and the roles they're missing out on pay more than double the average job. The numbers come from two reports LinkedIn's Economic Graph Research Institute published this summer, "The AI Triple Penalty" and "The AI Talent Divide," pulling from tens of millions of real hiring records. Beyond that headline 26% hiring gap, the leadership picture is even starker: women hold just 13% of C-suite AI roles across 27 countries, 20% of Head of AI positions, and 18% of technical staff roles at AI companies. The one AI job that has reached gender balance? Data annotation — the lowest-paid, most gig-based rung on the ladder, the work with the least say over how these systems actually get built.

"AI is creating some of the fastest-growing, highest-paying, most consequential jobs in the global economy, but women are strikingly underrepresented in terms of who is getting hired, who benefits from the pay premium, and who is leading the development and deployment of this tech," LinkedIn spokeswoman Sarah Steinberg told CBS News this week. That's not a skills-gap story. AI job postings have doubled since 2023 and women aren't failing to show up — they're being routed around.

It tracks with what we already knew was brewing. A Pew survey found women use AI noticeably less often than men at work, not because they can't, but because they're more worried about how using it will be perceived. And separately, women building AI companies are still struggling to get funded at anywhere near the rate men are — so the pipeline problem shows up at the idea stage, the hiring stage, and the leadership stage, all at once.

Why this hits differently if you're early in your career

If you're a woman in your 20s or early 30s right now, AI skills are becoming the fastest lane to a real pay bump in almost every industry — not just tech. This isn't only about whether you want to be a machine learning engineer. It's about whether you get looked at for the AI-adjacent version of the job you already do: the marketing role that now wants "AI workflow experience," the ops job that wants someone who can direct a model, the analyst role that pays more if you can show you've used these tools to make real decisions, not just draft an email faster.

The LinkedIn research is blunt about what actually moves people into the roles that pay: it's not certificates, it's not "I use ChatGPT sometimes." It's a portfolio that shows you made a business call using AI and it worked. Budget responsibility. A specific problem you solved, with a number attached to what changed. That's a different bar than "learn to prompt," and it's one you can start clearing this month, not eventually.

One thing to try this week

Pick one recurring task in your actual job — not a hypothetical, the real thing you did yesterday — and use AI to do it differently, then write down what changed in plain numbers: time saved, an error you caught, a decision you made faster or better. Keep that one example somewhere you'll find it again. That's the start of the portfolio the research says actually gets you noticed, and it costs you twenty minutes, not a certification program.

If you're further along and already managing people or budgets, ask directly for the AI-facing piece of a project instead of waiting to be assigned it. The gap in who's leading AI research closes one raised hand at a time, and rooms notice who asked.

Quote to sit with

"In the future, there will be no female leaders. There will just be leaders." — Sheryl Sandberg

💌 Sarah