AI jobs pay an average of $177,000 — but women make up just a quarter of new hires

Victoria VesovskiSat, August 22, 2026 at 2:30 PM UTC

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Artificial intelligence may be rattling the job market, but for workers with the right skills, the disruption comes with a lucrative upside.

New research from LinkedIn shows the typical AI-related job listing advertises a salary of roughly $177,000, compared with about $80,000 for a non-AI role. It is the kind of pay gap that makes the AI boom look less like a threat and more like an opportunity, at least for those positioned to take advantage of it.

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The trouble is, women are not sharing equally in that opportunity. Women remain underrepresented across much of the technology industry, and the latest hiring data suggests AI could widen that divide. In the U.S., women accounted for just 26% of hires into jobs requiring AI skills in 2025, compared with 50% of hires into non-AI roles.

Jackie Cook, founder and CEO of Momentum Group, says many women are already doing work that could reasonably be considered AI experience — redesigning workflows, analyzing data or building products — without necessarily thinking of themselves as “AI experts.”

“Who decides they're qualified enough to apply can shape the applicant pool before hiring even begins, and if that self-selection compounds with lower AI adoption and employers who define ‘AI talent’ narrowly, women risk being underrepresented in exactly the roles now commanding a wage premium, carrying today's pay gap into the next generation of work,” Cook told Moneywise.

There is evidence that women who use the technology are benefiting from it. Gusto’s 2026 research found that 54% of women who used AI to launch a business said the technology made the process easier, compared with 47% of men.

“The women who use it are getting real value,” Cook said. “My question is whether enough of them are raising their hand and calling it AI expertise.”

The AI ladder is narrowing

Women may be getting filtered out of the AI boom before a resume ever lands on a hiring manager’s desk — and when they are hired, they’re not climbing as quickly either.

Deepika Sidana, a senior manager and enterprise AI leader who also serves as Professional Development Director for the Society of Women Engineers’ New York chapter, says the problem is much bigger than skills or lack thereof.

“The biggest barrier is not simply the lack of technical ability; it is the entire pipeline — who is encouraged to pursue these fields, who has access to meaningful projects, who gets referred, who is evaluated fairly during hiring, and who receives sponsorship and advancement opportunities after joining,” Sidana told Moneywise.

According to Pew Research, in 2024, women in the U.S. earned 85 cents for every dollar earned by men, based on median hourly earnings for both full- and part-time workers. Moreover, across 27 countries, women hold just 13% of C-suite AI leadership roles at AI companies, according to LinkedIn. In other words, an already narrow pipeline becomes even tighter as women climb the corporate ladder, and many of them aren’t climbing it at all.

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Sidana adds that part of the problem is cultural. Technical confidence and engineering ability are still more readily associated with men, she explained, while women can find themselves expected to prove their competence before they are considered for the same opportunities.

“That perception is influencing young girls, education choices, hiring decisions, workplace visibility, and promotion opportunities,” she explained.

Read More: 4 simple ways to grow your cash without touching the stock market

You don’t need to start over

For women wondering whether breaking into AI requires a computer science degree or an entirely new career, Cook’s advice is to start with what you already know.

She recommends learning enough about AI to understand what it can and cannot do, then applying those tools to problems within your existing field. That might mean redesigning a workflow, using AI to analyze information or building a simple prototype that demonstrates what you can actually accomplish.

“A redesigned workflow or a prototype you built is worth more than an AI course on a resume,” she said. “It's evidence, not a claim.”

Cook followed that path herself. After more than two decades working in product and transformation without an engineering background, she learned how to use the technology alongside the expertise she had already built rather than abandoning one career to begin another.

But women remain underrepresented in plenty of the well-paid corners of the economy, and no amount of individual confidence can erase the structural barriers and systemic pitfalls that helped create those gaps in the first place.

But Cook’s advice is not to wait for those barriers to disappear before getting involved. Apply for the role for which you may not feel entirely ready. Put your name forward. And if you are already using AI to solve problems in your job, don't be afraid to call that experience what it is.

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This article provides information only and should not be construed as advice. It is provided without warranty of any kind.

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Source: “AOL Money”