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Artificial Intelligence
How AI and emerging tech are widening the gender pay gap
As investment in AI accelerates, access to emerging technology skills is becoming a decisive driver of career progression and pay. New research shows that structural features of tech roles, not women’s choices or capabilities, are widening the gender pay gap, and that organizations have clear levers to reverse this trend.
Rapid read:
- Emerging technology exposure drives wages and mobility, but women are underrepresented in these roles, reinforcing long-term pay and career gaps.
- Structural constraints – relocation, long hours, external job-hopping norms – systematically limit women’s access to high-value AI and tech opportunities.
- Redesigning roles around flexibility, internal mobility, and equitable project access is a competitive necessity, not a diversity add-on.
It’s estimated that investors have ploughed around $375bn into artificial intelligence in 2025, with McKinsey arguing that $5tn will need to be spent on data centers by 2030 to meet the growing demand for AI. Since ChatGPT launched in 2022, many of the discussions have focused on macro trends, such as whether AI will take our jobs or destroy the environment. While these are valid concerns, AI also has a more immediate impact. For instance, Oxford research reminds us that AI skills can have a significant impact on our careers.
Yet our research reveals that these career benefits are not equally available to everyone. While AI skills can boost one’s career prospects, there’s a clear gender divide in terms of access to training and the opportunity to develop the skills needed to thrive in the tech sector. This, in turn, helps to fuel the gender pay gap that sees women earning around 20% less than men.
The emerging tech gap
The numbers tell a stark story. Analyzing thousands of job applications to high-tech startups over nearly a decade, we found that women account for only 16% of applications to technical positions requiring emerging technology skills, compared to nearly 20% for positions using more mature technologies. That may seem like a small difference, but its implications are profound.
This matters because in the IT sector, exposure to emerging technologies is the primary driver of wage growth. We found that when we gain experience with new technologies, we don’t just earn more in our current roles, we also position ourselves for better opportunities later in our careers.Â
We found that skills in emerging technologies gave people a 6% boost to their salary compared to peers who lacked these skills. What’s more, these people would also often move jobs more frequently as the skills enabled them to seek higher-paid roles elsewhere. This, in turn, allowed them to climb the career ladder.
“The need to relocate also seems to play a significant role.”
Structure matters more than skills
Usually, when we think of gender gaps in tech, we talk in terms of pipeline-related issues. Not enough women take computer science at school, male-dominated workplaces have various cultural barriers, and so women both enter tech fields in lower numbers and leave the industry at an alarming rate. These are all valid concerns, but our research shows that managers should also be looking at more prosaic factors. We find that the problem isn’t women, or their choices and capabilities, but rather how organizations structure the kind of roles involving cutting-edge technology.
These cutting-edge positions come with distinctive demands. They require constant skill updating as technologies evolve, often necessitating extended work hours and on-call availability. Because emerging tech expertise is concentrated in specific geographic hubs, such as Silicon Valley for AI, or Austin for cloud computing, maximizing the financial return on these skills frequently requires relocating to where the jobs are clustered. And since the IT sector rewards external job mobility more than internal career ladders, getting ahead means regularly switching employers to capture the market value of newly acquired skills.
This is where gender dynamics play a part. While dual-earner households have become more common, we know that women still do more than their share of childcare and other household tasks. When both parents work, the data suggests that it’s predominantly women who focus on caregiving and men who focus on their careers. This can often be a choice that is structurally supported, with organizations rarely providing sufficient flexibility for both parents.
The need to relocate also seems to play a significant role. We found compelling evidence that relocation requirements specifically deter women from emerging tech roles. We analyzed applications where the candidate and job were in different cities and found that women were significantly less likely to apply, particularly for positions requiring emerging technology skills. For jobs in the same city, however, the gap between male and female application rates for emerging tech positions essentially disappeared.
The career penalty
The consequences of this phenomenon are sadly not confined to the job we’re in. Instead, it creates lasting disparities that can exist throughout our careers. Our research found three core mechanisms that underpin this.
The first is that women suffer from reduced mobility opportunities. We found that people who work with the latest technologies were more likely to switch employers in the search for new opportunities. This mobility is often how people were able to capture the true market value of their skills, but because women were less well represented in roles involving the latest technology, they had less access to this mobility.
A second factor is that women suffer from diminished bargaining power during interviews when they don’t have access to advanced skills. We found that people with the latest skills were typically able to command around 2% higher salary offers. When you multiply this across multiple jobs, it adds up to a significant difference.
The final factor is the missed opportunity to accumulate new skills. The world is moving at a growing pace, so it’s vital that people are able to continually update their skills. If women aren’t being given the opportunity to both learn and then deepen new skills, they find themselves at a clear disadvantage as new technologies mature. It’s a skills gap that is only likely to widen in time.
A good next step is to ensure that career mobility isn’t dependent on moving between firms.
What can we do about it?
Too often, when we look at the gender pay gap, we focus on “fixing women” – for example, by encouraging more aggressive negotiation or a greater willingness to relocate or work longer hours.
But what about if we were to focus instead on redesigning the system – and how might this look? We saw during the COVID-19 pandemic a glimpse into this future, with remote work becoming standard. We know that the rise in remote working has coincided with growth in the number of women applying for technical roles, as this removes the need to relocate. It’s a natural experiment that clearly showed how women’s participation can increase when structural barriers are removed.
There are also some other structural changes. A first step is to make flexibility the default rather than an exception. For instance, rather than treating remote work as an exception and on-premise working as the norm, we should design roles that are flexible from the start. The infrastructure for remote work clearly exists, so the barriers are cultural.
A good next step is to ensure that career mobility isn’t dependent on moving between firms. This has long been a suspicion, and it belies the value of being able to progress internally, both for the employer and the employee. This would be beneficial for all employees, not just women, but it would certainly help those facing mobility constraints.
We should also look afresh at our expectations with regard to the hours we want people to work. We know that people increasingly value a good work-life balance, and also that a good work-life balance isn’t detrimental to productivity. The extended work hours and constant availability don’t reflect genuine necessity as much as they do organizational culture.
Last, but not least, we should ensure equitable access to projects involving new and emerging technology. We know from our research that exposure to these technologies is key to getting ahead at work, so it’s crucial that access to these opportunities is fairly distributed and not given to those who can work long hours or relocate at the drop of a hat.
When we talk about the gender pay gap in tech, we’re not just talking about women’s choices or even women’s capabilities.
A logical approach
It’s tempting to think that this purely affects individual workers, but it has clear implications for organizations. At the moment, we’re systematically excluding half of the potential talent pool at a time when the industry remains short on skilled professionals. It’s akin to a self-imposed competitive handicap.
What’s more, it’s a handicap that is only going to get greater as we invest more and more in new technologies. Now is the time to build more equitable systems that break down existing inequalities rather than reinforce them.
When we talk about the gender pay gap in tech, we’re not just talking about women’s choices or even women’s capabilities. Instead, we’re talking about how opportunities are structured. Just as the problem is largely caused by us as managers, so too is the solution within our control. It’s up to us whether we take those steps to shrink the gap.
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