The Daily Journal.— At the current pace, the world will need another 120 years to achieve full equality between men and women after a year of marginal progress. At the same time, the artificial intelligence (AI) industry continues to reproduce and deepen existing employment and wage disparities, the World Economic Forum (WEF) warned Wednesday in its annual Global Gender Gap Report.
The report notes that women’s participation in the AI ecosystem remains largely concentrated in lower-paid areas, such as data labeling and annotation. Globally, women account for only 19.3% of engineering professionals specializing in this technology.
Segregation in the technology sector
“Women are less represented in AI companies than in comparable non-AI companies at every level; they account for 36.6% and 44.8% of employees in individual contributor roles, respectively, and between 25.3% and 27.7% of senior management,” the World Economic Forum report states.
Meanwhile, the share of female founders with AI engineering skills rose from 2.3% in 2019 to 8.7% in the first two quarters of 2026, but men advanced much faster.
Sue Duke, a LinkedIn executive whom the Forum cited, noted that the stagnation of female leadership in technology will prevent current generations from achieving equal representation during their working lives.
Political and corporate stagnation
The analysis, which assessed 145 economies — including 97 with an uninterrupted historical data series dating back to 2006 — found the widest gap in political empowerment, where achieving parity will take 194 years.
The share of countries with female heads of state or government fell back to levels last seen in 2016 after peaking at 27% in 2022. Although the number of female ministers has increased by 26% since 2008, only one in ten leads a ministry with significant economic or institutional influence.
Across the broader corporate sector, women hold 19.1% of chief executive officer (CEO) positions, while the share of women hired for leadership roles fell from 34.8% in 2022 to 32.3% in 2026.
Iceland continues to lead the global index for the 17th consecutive year, having closed 93% of its gender gap, followed by Finland, Norway, Namibia and the United Kingdom.
With information from EFE
