Study: Where Women Are Leading AI Development

It’s well documented that women occupy a disproportionate number of tech roles. When it comes to STEM leadership positions, this number is even lower—with women making up less than 25% of C-level leadership in tech.

With this in mind, we set out to learn more about the presence of women in artificial intelligence (AI), more specifically, the women in AI leadership roles. Every day, new AI innovations materialize with groundbreaking developments that will forever change our world. Given the rapid pace of AI advancement and the major impacts these innovations will have on everyone, it’s important to ask the question: Who is engineering the path?

This question is even more important when considering how much a homogenous AI system can perpetuate gender and racial biases. Diversity in AI development is crucial to creating AI systems of tomorrow that will be directly involved in our healthcare, transportation, social media, workforce, and much more.

Diversity failures in AI can have vast consequences for many individuals due to biased outcomes and discrimination that can be inadvertently built into these systems.

To illuminate this crucial question, the team at Fullstack Academy conducted an in-depth analysis of the Forbes AI 50 list, focusing on the gender composition of executive teams for these leading AI companies. The Forbes AI 50 list highlights the most promising privately held AI companies worldwide. Our deep dive uncovers AI companies where women are leading the development and the places where women are still largely underrepresented in this sector.

Our findings suggest that the proportion of women in AI leadership roles is trending upward compared to that of women leaders in STEM fields at large. But with AI in particular, gender diversity opens a host of other considerations.

Read on to uncover the encouraging signs of gender diversity progress in AI technology, and join us in exploring the AI companies that appear least concerned with diversity in AI leadership, as exemplified by their all-male executive teams.

Key Takeaways

• Women have the most influence at Pika, a video generation service company, where 6 of its 7 (86%) top executives are women.

• Women have the #2 and #3 most influence at Writer and Cradle, where 4 of the 6 (67%) and 5 of the 11 (45%) top executives, respectively, are women.

• Women hold only 79 out of 336 executive positions in AI, comprising just 24% of all executives in AI.

• Only 10% of AI companies are women-led, but 20% were founded by women.

• Stanford University confers the most degrees to women executives in AI, with 17 degrees earned among the 79 women executives.

AI Companies Most Influenced by Women

Leading the way as the AI company with the most influence by women is Pika, a video generation service company. At this organization, women hold 86% of the executive positions. Of the 7-person executive team, women currently occupy 6 of the roles. At Pika, Chenlin Meng holds the title of Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, alongside Demi G who is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer.

Additionally, Luz Toledo is the Chief of Staff, Jieliang Hao is the Head of Business, Leonie Engel holds the title of Head of Growth, and finally, Lindsay Brillson is the Head of Brand and Content.

Coming in second with 67% of the company’s executive roles held by women is Writer, which focuses on enterprise generative AI software. Headquartered in San Francisco, 4 of the 6 people on the executive board are women. The board is comprised of May Habib, the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Karen Situ, the Chief of Staff, Doris Jwo, the Head of Product, and Whit Bouck, the Board Director.

In third place with women occupying 45% of the executive positions is Cradle. The company, which is headquartered in Delft, Netherlands, has a focus on protein design for drug discovery. On an executive team of 11 people, 5 are women. Among them are Elise de Reus, Co-Founder, Tilke Judd, Founding Product Manager, Luba Protopopova, Chief Operating Officer, and Leila Zegna and Sofia Dolfe, who are both board directors.

Overall, we found that just over two-thirds of the AI companies analyzed have at least one woman on the executive board. So of the 336 executive positions in AI analyzed, women hold 79 roles. Additionally, only 10% of AI companies are women-led, but 20% were founded by women.

When it comes to the largest all-male executive teams, Scale AI, Unstructured, and Tractian are the most funded AI companies. Although the average funding for AI companies with at least one woman executive is just under $1 billion, the average funding for AI companies with all-male executives is $165 million.

For a full overview of the women who hold executive positions at the largest AI companies in 2024, view the interactive table below.

The Educational Paths of Women AI Leaders

After uncovering the AI companies where women are leading the way, we decided to gain insight into the paths that led them there. More specifically, the educational paths.

Fullstack Academy and Grace Hopper Program bootcamp graduates often go on to pursue leadership roles. In doing so, they start their own companies, create meaningful professional connections, and attain additional educational qualifications. In following our graduates’ illustrious careers, we were curious about the educational paths of current high-profile women tech executives—and how those paths might change in the future.

Overall, of the 79 executives, 68 hold bachelor’s degrees, 46 have obtained their master’s degrees, and 22 earned doctorate degrees.

When it comes to the areas of study at the doctoral level, we discovered that 22 executives studied computer science and law, making the two fields the most common areas of study for women executives in AI. As for the master’s degrees obtained, nearly half of the executives (45%) studied business.

Rounding out the education for bachelor’s degrees, we found two areas of study to be the most popular, economics and biology, as 73 of the 79 professionals gained degrees in these fields.

As shown, these career paths can look different from one person to the next. So even if you didn’t study computer science in school, the Grace Hopper Program can be your gateway to a meaningful career—perhaps one as high-profile as the executives mentioned in this study.

At the Grace Hopper Program, our online bootcamps are designed to empower women and nonbinary students to thrive in tech. With gender-allied tech education, the program aims to help you build the technical and interpersonal skills essential for success at every level of your tech career—including leadership.

Top Universities for Women in AI

As a trailblazer in tech education, we also wanted to gain insight into the institutes that helped these professionals earn their degrees and reach the executive positions they now hold. With 17 degrees obtained, we found Stanford University confers the most degrees to women executives in AI.

Following closely behind on the list with 16 degrees is Harvard University. On either coast of the U.S., the two highly esteemed universities have been a hot spot for many executives in AI.

Next up on our list is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where 6 degrees have been earned by these executives. In fourth with 5 degrees awarded is Sciences Po in Paris, which is also the only non-American university that made the list of alma maters for women executives in AI.

While these executives are AI leadership pioneers, it isn’t solely due to their educational background. At Fullstack Academy, we know the importance of specialized training, and have designed immersive programs to prepare students for a wide range of careers in tech. Through these bootcamps, you will develop in-demand skills plus hands-on experience—as well as valuable professional skills you can use to propel your career forward.

Start Leading the AI Movement Today

As tech companies and the industry at large begin to recognize the tangible, positive impacts of closing the gender gap, gender-allied tech education plays a crucial role in training the next generation of women leaders. The Grace Hopper Program at Fullstack Academy, for instance, is a coding bootcamp built exclusively for women and nonbinary prospective software engineers. Its mission is to equip underrepresented professionals with the technical and interpersonal skills to thrive in tech roles—including AI leadership.

As our findings clearly show, the AI industry is far from achieving gender parity at the executive level. However, the enormous success of women-founded and -led AI companies like Pika and Writer demonstrates the immense value diverse leadership brings to AI innovation—not just monetarily for those companies but by creating better, more robust AI systems that serve all people and are not biased to a specific group.

Explore the Grace Hopper Program to learn more about how you can be part of the solution for increased diversity, innovation, and meaningful impact in tech. Whether you are already a tech professional or looking to just break into the field, the Grace Hopper Program teaches a cutting-edge gender-allied tech curriculum that will ensure you are part of the solution for increased diversity in tech leadership.

Methodology

In June 2024, we analyzed the top executives at what Forbes and Sequoia Capital recognized in May 2023 as the 50 most promising privately held artificial intelligence companies. Our research seeks to identify where women have the most influence on the highly consequential evolution of AI. In order to establish this, we accounted for the number of women in influential positions at each of these 50 companies, the proportion of women amongst all executives, and the level of significance indicated by each woman's title. Below are details describing how we reached our conclusions.

How We Define Influential Executives

Using information from Crunchbase, Pitchbook, LinkedIn, and The Official Board, we noted what these reporting platforms indicate are key executives in each company. Below is a list of executive types that were and were not counted as influential in our analysis:

Counted:

• Chief Executives and other members of the C-suite

• Presidents

• Founders and Co-Founders

• Chairpersons, Board Members

• Advisors

• Heads (e.g., Head of Operations, Head of Finance)

• Managing Directors

Not counted:

• Directors

• Vice Presidents

• General Managers

How We Score Companies

Each company is given an overall score based on two factors, equally weighted: Women Power Ranking and Women Executive Ratio.

Women Power Ranking: This index considers the significance of women-held positions and assigns points to each. To arrive at our index score, we added all the points across all women executives at each company. Below are points earned by each job title category:

• CEO / Founder / Chairman / President (4 points)

• C-suite, non-CEO (3 points)

• Board Member / Advisor (2 points)

• Management (e.g., Heads of) (2 points)

Women Executive Ratio: This is the ratio of women executives to total executives counted in our analysis.

How We Rank Companies with No Women in Influential Positions

Eighteen of the 50 companies recognized by Forbes had no women executives in influential positions. Rather than consider these all tied for a lack of influence by women, we decided to further calculate rankings based on other metrics. Of the remaining company rankings after #32, we ranked them first on their total number of executives absent a woman (e.g., 0 / 8 is worse than 0 / 3), and second, within those tiers of executive team size, we ranked each company based on funding secured, which we consider a proxy for influence in AI technology evolution (e.g., higher funding without a woman in an influential position is worse). In short, companies are penalized for having larger teams of all-male executives with larger amounts of funding.

Education Data

All education data is sourced from executives' LinkedIn profiles and is thereby subject to user input error.