Multiple executives have decamped from OpenAI ahead of its forthcoming IPO, including some of the most prominent women in its C-suite.
Last week, Denise Dresser stepped away from her post as chief revenue officer to “pursue other opportunities,” barely a month after top executive Fidji Simo dropped to a part-time role for health reasons. In the months prior, the company had lost a number of other female leaders: Former chief marketing officer Kate Rouch left the company—citing her recovery from cancer treatment—as did ethics chief Chloé Bakalar and hardware lead Caitlin Kalinowski.
While some of these exits involved extenuating circumstances, the overall picture reflects a larger trend in the ranks of AI leadership, where women are woefully underrepresented.
In a new analysis, LinkedIn’s Economic Graph Research Institute found that across 27 countries—and tens of millions of workers—women only accounted for about 31% of AI leadership roles, defined as jobs at the director level or above. The share of women shrank further in executive roles at AI companies: Women only held one in eight technical roles in the C-suite, as compared to about a quarter of C-suite roles across the workforce. At smaller companies with 200 or fewer employees, the lack of female representation was more acute.
But much like the rest of corporate America, this dearth of representation starts long before the C-suite.
LinkedIn’s research found that fewer women are chosen for AI roles in the first place: In 2025, only 26% of people hired for AI jobs were women, as compared to 50% of women in non-AI jobs. Across entry-level AI roles, only 29% of employees were women, a stark contrast to female representation across the workforce; the 2025 Women in the Workplace report by McKinsey and Lean In found there was a more or less equal gender split in corporate entry level roles (49%).
And it’s not just entry-level roles where this disparity shows up. On the whole, LinkedIn’s analysis found that the number of women across AI jobs is about 10 percentage points lower relative to female representation in non-AI jobs. There are also fewer women working at AI companies overall—lower than the share of women at other companies by five percentage points—regardless of the specific role.
This also means women are being shut out of some of the most lucrative jobs on the market today. In fact, according to the LinkedIn analysis, female employees account for only 20% of “head of AI” roles and just over a quarter of director-level AI jobs.
Instead, women are more likely to hold jobs in, say, data annotation or other AI positions with lower pay. (Some of those jobs are also more susceptible to being automated down the road, an issue that will likely disproportionately impact women across sectors.)
As the report notes, the AI boom has led to a marked increase in the number of AI jobs—about twice the number of opportunities. As demand has increased, so too has compensation; on average, AI jobs pay over double as much as other jobs.
It’s not unusual for women to encounter the “broken rung” phenomenon as they ascend through a company, which can make it more difficult for them to advance into senior roles. Men are more likely to be promoted to managerial positions at a higher rate, leaving fewer and fewer women to join the leadership ranks.
Across the corporate workforce, there is a steep decline in the share of women as you get closer to the C-suite. But the stakes are especially high in the realm of AI. It’s not just that women are losing out on professional opportunities and earnings potential, or that AI leaders might be recreating some of the same dynamics that have made the tech industry inhospitable to so many women.
By failing to invest in female talent, AI companies are excluding women from the crucial role of shaping the most consequential technology of our time.
