Women lag men in AI roles despite gains in education, says WEF

Despite significant advancements in education, women continue to lag behind men in artificial intelligence (AI) roles, according to the World Economic Forum's (WEF) 2026 Global Gender Gap Report. While women have made strides in senior leadership positions across business and government, they remain underrepresented in the most influential AI roles.

The report reveals that women comprise only 19.3% of AI engineers, with many concentrated in lower-paid data annotation roles. In contrast, they represent 36.6% of employees and 25.3% to 27.7% of top management positions in non-AI firms. The report also notes that progress in achieving gender parity is fragile, with some gains reversing in certain areas.

Notably, political empowerment, which has seen the most significant improvement, now scores lower than in 2016 and has slipped by 0.4 percentage points in the past year. The gap is particularly wide in economic participation and opportunity, and political empowerment, with these dimensions remaining the furthest from parity among the 97 economies tracked since 2006.

Despite this, the report highlights that gender parity is achievable and essential for growth and competitiveness, urging governments and employers to learn from successful policies and implement them more swiftly.