According to the UNESCO Science Report published in 2021, the clock is ticking for transitioning to digital and ‘green’ societies. With rapid expansion in the artificial intelligence (AI) sector, the number of workers with AI skills increased by 190%.

The World Economic Forum (2018a) found that ‘industries with more AI skills present among their workforce are also the fastest-changing industries.

In the United States, AI has the highest-paid experts in any field of technology. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau, the pay gap in computer science is one of the smallest between male and female professionals in the USA, with women earning 94% of what men take home.

Why, then, are women still a minority among employees of digital tech giants? According to data collected by the social networking site LinkedIn and published in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report, only 22% of professionals working in AI around the world are female.

This gap is visible in all of the top 20 countries with the highest concentration of AI employees and is particularly evident in Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Mexico, and Poland, where fewer than 18% of women professionals have AI skills.

Although the top multinational technology companies are making progress, they are still not even close to closing the gender gap in technical and leadership roles.

Although there has been some progress in the share of women hired by Google, less than a quarter of technical roles were filled by women in 2018. We can see the same pattern in another US tech giant, Apple, the leading manufacturer of computers and smartphones.

Despite implementing measures since 2014 to hire more women and minorities each year, women made up only 23% of employees in technical roles and 29% in leadership positions by December 2018.

Amazon, the world’s largest e-commerce marketplace and cloud computing platform, is also attempting to correct the gender imbalance. It tracks the numbers and roles of women and underrepresented minorities among its employees.

However, as of December 2018, only 27% of its managers around the world were women. When the company realized that its AI system was not rating candidates for software developer jobs and other technical posts in a gender-neutral way, it committed US$ 50 million to support STEM programs for underrepresented communities.

Facebook fares better than its fellow tech giants for the number of women holding senior leadership positions (33%) but the percentage of women employed in technical roles remains low, at 23%.