Artificial intelligence is creating new employment opportunities, but women are taking a minority of them. A LinkedIn study covering 27 countries, including Spain, found that women account for between 13% and 29% of AI jobs within companies in the sector, with their representation declining as positions become more senior. The figures indicate that the gender imbalance in technology extends into the rapidly expanding AI workforce, where access to jobs and leadership positions is already uneven.
The disparity is visible even as demand for AI-related skills grows. A search of Spain’s InfoJobs vacancies found 744 of 61,683 listings, or 1.2%, included artificial intelligence in their descriptions. Randstad recorded a similar proportion, with 122 of 6,560 vacancies, or 1.8%, referring to AI. Experts expect the number of such positions to increase, but the LinkedIn findings suggest that the benefits of that expansion are not being distributed equally between men and women.
Spain’s position may be weaker than the international average. José Varela, an AI specialist at UGT, said that “la participación en el mercado laboral español puede ser menor al promedio global” — women’s participation in the Spanish labour market may be below the global average. One factor is the comparatively low proportion of women with information and communications technology (ICT) training. InfoJobs data show that women account for just 18% of candidates with these skills.
Varela also identifies limited career prospects as a reason some women leave or avoid the technology sector. An UGT report found that 43% of female professionals in the sector leave their jobs after becoming mothers, compared with 23% of men after becoming fathers. “La razón es que no hay una conciliación con la vida familiar,” Varela said. The imbalance reflects a wider division of unpaid work. Figures from Spain’s National Statistics Institute show that women spend 26.5 hours a week on care, cleaning or unpaid work for non-governmental organisations, compared with 14 hours for men.
The shortage of women becomes more pronounced in AI-specific recruitment. LinkedIn describes what it calls a “triple penalty”: women occupy fewer positions of power overall, fewer AI positions, and a smaller share of new hires in AI companies. In Spain, 16% of companies have ICT specialists among their employees, yet only 6.5% hire women for such vacancies. That figure falls to 1% among companies where at least half of the ICT workforce is female, according to the National Statistics Institute’s survey on technology use.
The stakes are rising as AI employment expands and commands higher salaries. In the United States, the supply of AI-related positions has doubled in recent years. A separate LinkedIn study found that such jobs pay more than twice as much as positions unrelated to AI: an average of $177,000 (€154,200) a year, compared with $80,000 (€69,700). Spain is also recording growth. Digitales, the business association, found that AI vacancies increased by 16% between the first quarter of 2025 and the first quarter of 2026. Mónica Pérez, director of studies at InfoJobs, said leadership positions had recorded the strongest growth, while AI was taking over some tasks traditionally performed by less experienced professionals, including programming.
The imbalance has implications beyond access to high-paying employment. Research cited in the source material has documented gender bias in AI systems, creating a potential risk when the technology is used in areas such as recruitment and medical diagnosis. In one example, researchers asked ChatGPT to assess CVs and select the most qualified candidates. They found that the system assumed women had less experience than men, placing female candidates at a disadvantage.
AI is also changing existing work rather than simply eliminating entire occupations. OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, analysed 800,000 work messages in the United States and found that 17% concerned tasks unrelated to the user’s formal role. The International Labour Organisation argues that the arrival of AI may therefore appear less as straightforward job losses than as changes in activities, skills and working conditions.
However, if forecasts of widespread job displacement materialise, women could face a disproportionate impact because occupations with high concentrations of female workers are among those considered most exposed to automation, including secretarial, accounting-assistant and other office-support roles. Earlier technological changes have also destroyed jobs while creating new ones. Deloitte estimates that 3.5 million jobs disappeared in the United Kingdom between 2000 and 2024, while 8.5 million were created. The remaining uncertainty is the speed at which AI will create replacement employment and, as Varela puts it, “cuánto tiempo tardará una persona en reincorporarse a la fuerza laboral una vez que su puesto desaparezca”.
