Women got a quarter of new AI jobs last year and are overrepresented in the roles most exposed to AI job loss, LinkedIn data shows

Women are more exposed to AI job loss and less likely to get the new AI jobs, according to LinkedIn research reported by the Guardian on 4 October 2026. Women made up only about a quarter of new hires into AI roles in the past year, against half of new hires into other roles, and 13 percent in executive roles. At the same time LinkedIn's research finds women more likely to work in jobs with high exposure to AI disruption, such as customer service, which puts them at higher risk of losing work to it. AI jobs, whose postings have doubled since 2023, pay on average more than twice as much as jobs that do not involve AI, but women in the field are concentrated in lower-paid work such as data annotation, said Sarah Steinberg, LinkedIn's head of global public policy partnerships; across all AI occupations men's median pay is $45,000 higher. "AI is creating some of the fastest growing, highest paying and most consequential jobs in the global economy," Steinberg said. "Women are just strikingly underrepresented." Brenda Darden Wilkerson, president of AnitaB.org, called it "a sort of backsliding" and said companies hiring at speed are still finding people "through the same networks, the same referrals, the same filters that they've always used." Jayeeta Putatunda, an AI engineering lead at Turing, described 12-hour days to keep up and returning from four months of maternity leave to "completely different frameworks and levels of models." Felicia Newhouse, founder of AI Powered Women, said cutbacks to diversity programmes under federal pressure have made women-focused initiatives harder to run: "The deepest risk is that a participation gap becomes a power gap."