The AI hiring boom is not closing the gender gap in tech work. It is widening it. New LinkedIn research finds women took just 26 percent of U.S. AI-skilled hires in 2025, even as those roles pay more than double the typical non-AI position, and the shortfall compounds the higher up the ladder it goes.
What happened
LinkedIn’s Economic Graph Research Institute analyzed member employment histories and job postings across 24 countries and published the findings, framed as a “triple penalty,” on its newsroom on August 18. Women hold just 13 percent of C-suite AI leadership roles across the 27 countries studied, versus roughly 26 percent of C-suite roles in non-AI companies, a gap the research attributes to three stacked shortfalls: fewer women in AI-classified jobs, fewer at AI-focused companies, and far fewer in AI executive seats. The typical AI job posting carries about $177,000 in pay, against roughly $80,000 for a comparable non-AI role.
Why it matters for the HR leader
Pay equity and succession-planning data that looks balanced in aggregate can hide a widening AI-specific gap. If women are underrepresented in exactly the roles commanding the AI pay premium, aggregate gender pay gap reporting will understate the real disparity emerging inside it.
The original insight
The gap is not primarily a pipeline problem at entry level, where LinkedIn’s data shows the disparity is smaller. It widens at each promotion gate above it, the same structural pattern already flagged in AI Skills Now Appear in Nearly Three-Quarters of Tech Job Postings, and the Talent Pool Has Not Caught Up. That points HR toward internal mobility and sponsorship programs into AI roles, not just external recruiting, as the lever most likely to move the number, a distinction increasingly relevant as EEOC scrutiny of workplace equity programs intensifies, per EEOC Sues University Over DEI Training Segregation.
Source: LinkedIn
