Gender Parity in the Intelligent Age 2025

Gender Parity to fuel the Intelligent Age 2 AI innovation: the power of expanding talent pools 2.1As the adoption of AI evolves, so does the scope of implications to businesses and economies. Economies moving towards the AI frontier with less than half the necessary talent, creativity and input are likely to face significant economic drag – which will be compounded by the downstream costs resulting from the social and economic AI disenfranchisement. To conceptualize the existing and persistent gender gaps at the core of a tech-driven economy, this section presents insights from an ongoing data collaboration with LinkedIn in the context of the Global Gender Gap Report series which are expanded in this white paper. These insights paint an evolving picture of how gender gaps in talent are transitioning into the Intelligent Age, shedding light on new opportunities and challenges that come with the adoption of talent strategies to win the AI talent race. Innovation ecosystems that engage the full spectrum of creative talent, from a gender parity perspective, have the potential to reduce bias, improve accessibility and expand economic opportunities for innovators and the constituents their advancements benefit. AI applications are a promising mechanism for helping to mitigate bias in hiring, pay structures, and workplace dynamics – all of which will foster a more inclusive job market. Such a vision is contingent on having a healthy and heterogenous pipeline of innovators present at every stage of the technology lifecycle – from ideation to development and delivery. However, in a number of economies, we see pipelines bursting with female talent at the early stages reduced to a drip of seasoned and crowned innovators at the later stages. The environmental factors that contribute to the degradation of women’s opportunities in innovation reflect, in part, the uneven conditions under which innovation currently takes place. Only few regions have a majority share of their economies participating in the development of new AI processes, applications and technologies. Of all the economies featured in the 2024 edition of the Global Gender Gap Index, 66 have applied for AI patents and 59 have received them. The Emerging Technology Observatory (ETO) (Figure 1) shows that Northern America and Europe are two distinct hubs of AI innovation in terms of the share of economies in the region participating. By that measure, the Eastern Asia and the Pacific; Middle East and Northern Africa, and Latin America and the Caribben regions demonstrate moderate participation in AI innovation, while Central Asia, Southern Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa have the lowest proportion of economies engaged in AI innovation The ETO data set also reveals that, while a lower share of economies in Eastern Asia and the Pacific are participating in AI innovation, they are obtaining a larger share of patents (Figure 2). As a regional block, Eastern Asia and the Pacific has granted nearly four times as many patents as Northern America and 40 times as many as Europe. Approximately 77% of granted AI patents worldwide come from the EAP region, compared to only 20% from Northern America. Most of the region’s activity is driven by China, a finding that reflects two significant developments for AI gender parity: (1) Chinese nationals are estimated to represent approximately over one-quarter of global AI talent, and (2) An overwhelming majority of them are absorbed by the national AI industry.1Businesses and economies chasing tech- enabled growth will be best served by casting a wide and robust talent net – one that keeps female talent from “dropping off”. Gender Parity in the Intelligent Age 6