More women making a career in AI

Author Moonshot.news

Published on: 29/07/2024

Women are a force in artificial intelligence. Men still outnumber women, but over the past four years, the share of female AI talent has increased significantly, data from World Economic Forum shows. Since 2016, the concentration of women working in AI engineering has grown significantly, according to Microsoft-owned LinkedIn’s data. 

The hiring of women into leadership roles continues to decline but GenAI presents an opportunity to help close the gender gap. Women are pushing forward with their own technical upskilling, Sue Duke, head of global public policy at LinkedIn, writes in a blog post. 

LinkedIn predicts the skillsets required for jobs globally will change by as much as 68% by 2030. Many of these will be soft, interpersonal skills needed for team leadership, strategic leadership and collaboration. Of the soft skills listed on LinkedIn, women were found to have a 28% higher share than men.

WOMEN LEADERS

LinkedIn data shows that women are less likely than last year to reach a leadership position. In 2022, the global hiring rate for women into leadership roles topped 38%. It has fallen each year since and is now down to 36%.

“It’s a slow but steady downward trend that we’re seeing globally, including in major economies such as the United States, the United Kingdom and France. This decline should set off alarm bells across sectors and countries; female representation at the leadership level has risen by less than 1% in six years (30.9% to 31.7%)”, Duke writes.

“Policymakers must enable and demand actions that businesses must take to support women as they move through their careers to open doors which might otherwise be closed.”

“The evidence shows flexible working policies also help women, who typically apply for more hybrid and remote roles than men. We know that care responsibilities can disproportionately impact women, so workplaces must have policies that counteract this imbalance.”

World Economic Forum’s says gender parity in general will take another 134 years to reach. Underrepresentation of women in sectors with higher paying jobs, including technology and infrastructure, is one of the reasons for the gender pay gap. 

This year, women make up 28.2% of the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) workforce, but the picture is improving for AI Engineering talent, the WEF report says. Although men still outnumber women, over the past four years the share of female AI talent has increased significantly, 

EXPLAINING GENDER GAP

The report quotes LinkedIn data suggesting gender gaps in online professional networks lead to men typically having larger networks and stronger networks than women. Stronger networks are associated with increased probability of career improvement and receive more contacts with recruiters.  

In terms of being future-ready, women lag behind men in online skilling, with Coursera data showing AI and big data (30%), programming (31%) and networks and cybersecurity (31%) lag in gender parity.

The WEF report says: “These findings underscore the need for targeted interventions to bridge this gap and ensure equitable access to emerging technological competencies, particularly since generative AI is a fast-growing technology with the potential to enable tailored learning experiences fitting the needs of diverse learner populations.”

The global gender gap score in 2024 for all 146 countries included the WEF report stands at 68.5%. 

Compared against the constant sample of 143 countries included in last year’s edition, the global gender gap has been closed by a further +.1 percentage point, from 68.5% to 68.6%. When considering the 101 countries covered continuously from 2006 to 2024, the gap has also improved +.1 points and reached 68.6%. 

“The lack of meaningful, widespread change since the last edition effectively slows down the rate of progress to attain parity. Based on current data, it will take 134 years to reach full parity – roughly five generations beyond the 2030 Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target.”

Key WEF findings: 

• The 2024 Global Gender Gap Index shows that while no country has achieved full gender parity, 97% of the economies included in this edition have closed more than 60% of their gap, compared to 85% in 2006. 
• Iceland (93.5%) is again ranked 1st and has been leading the index for a decade and a half. It also continues to be the only economy to have closed over 90% of its gender gap. 
• European economies occupy seven spots out of the global top 10. In addition to Iceland, these include Finland (87.5%), Norway (87.5%), Sweden (81.6%), Germany (81%), Ireland (80.2%) and Spain (79.7%). The remaining three spots are (New Zealand (4th, 83.5%), (Nicaragua, (6th, 81.1%), and Namibia (8th, 80.5%). 
• Health and Survival gender gap has closed by 96%, the Educational Attainment gap by 94.9%, the Economic Participation and Opportunity gap by 60.5%, and the Political Empowerment gap by 22.5%. 
• In Political Empowerment, parity has jumped a total of 8.3 percentage points to 22.8% over the past 18 editions. In Economic Participation and Opportunity and Educational Attainment, parity has gained 4.8 and 4.2 percentage points respectively. Health and Survival is the only subindex where there has been a moderate decline from 2006 (-0.2 points).
• With the evolving pace of each individual subindex affecting their respective timelines to parity, results from this year have extended the wait for parity in Educational Attainment to 20 years (+4 years from 2023) and Political Empowerment to 169 years (+7 years from 2023), yet brought forth the timeline for Economic Participation and Opportunity to 152 years (-17 years from 2023). The time to close the Health and Survival gender gap remains undefined.