WEF: women hold 19.3% of AI engineer roles as parity gains stall

The World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report 2026, published in Geneva, says the world is closer to gender parity than at any time in 20 years but progress is fragile and reversing in political empowerment. Women make up just 19.3% of AI engineers and are concentrated in lower-paid data annotation work, while the share of women founders with AI engineering skills rose to 8.7% in the first half of 2026. Southern Asia remains the lowest-scoring region for economic participation at 40.9%.