The gender gap in AI is a real issue

The Global Gender Gap Report 2018 recently published by the World Economic Forum devotes one of its sections to the worrying gender gap we observe in a professional field with one of the brightest futures: Artificial Intelligence (AI). To elaborate this section of the report, the analysts of the World Economic Forum used data from LinkedIn, in particular information on the AI skills the users of this platform claim to possess. Of course, what a person says on her LinkedIn profile is not a guarantee that the person is a true expert in the subject. But still, the gender gap revealed by this data is very significant: only 22% of AI professionals in the (LinkedIn) world are women, compared to 78% men, which means that each woman who works in this field has