Women hold less than 30% of AI roles

Women are underrepresented in a wide variety of fields and as the artificial intelligence industry gains steam, the gender disparity becomes even more clear. According to a study by Deloitte, women hold less than 30% of roles in artificial intelligence globally. Sallie Krawcheck, CEO Ellevest, joined TheStreet to discuss this gap as well as what her company is doing to fix this.

Full Video Transcript Below:

SARA SILVERSTEIN: And is it true that 30% of global AI jobs are held by women? Only 30%?

SALLIE KRAWCHECK: So many things. Isn't it, so many things when you look at technology, when you look at finance as well, that these have been really male dominated industries. There are a lot of great efforts to bring women into all of these areas. But when you look at the top, it's still tends to be more male.

SARA SILVERSTEIN: And how does that impact how women end up using financial services, how women end up using AI, or how AI and financial services treat women?

SALLIE KRAWCHECK: Well, now you're asking, why does Ellevest exist? Right so what do we know? We know that women don't invest as much as men do. We know it costs women hundreds of thousands for some women, millions over the course of their lives. We on Wall Street back when I was running some of the big Wall Street businesses, knew why. Ah, women are risk averse. Everybody everybody knows women are risk averse. Oh my gosh, they don't like trading. Need more financial education. There were these reasons why women didn't invest in much and all of them were her fault. And we just stayed it like it was a flat out fact. 

At Ellevest, we said, wait a second. That could be one reason why she doesn't invest as much. And another could be that in an industry that's overwhelmingly male, where if you look around the floor here of the New York Stock exchange, overwhelmingly male, financial advisors have been overwhelmingly male, money managers, even with women outperforming men is mutual fund managers. Over like 98% of mutual fund dollars are managed by men. Ellevest said, wait a second, maybe the industry, men built the industry for men, didn't mean to, didn't set out to, didn't know they were doing it. Maybe we should build a business that centers women. And by doing that, maybe then we can encourage women to become more involved with their finances and to invest more. And it's exactly what we're doing.