Canada has the globe’s fifth largest artificial intelligence workforce, but is still far from closing the gender gap in the sector, according to new rankings from the World Economic Forum.
The international organization used LinkedIn data to find the size of Canada’s AI workforce is lagging behind the U.S., India, Germany and Switzerland, but beating dozens of countries including France, Spain, Singapore and Sweden.
However, the Forum found as part of its annual rankings on gender disparities that women only make up 24 per cent of Canada’s AI workforce, and 22 per cent of the world’s AI workforce.
The Forum said the lack of women in Canada’s and the global AI pool is troubling because it implies that technology is being developed without diverse talent, thus “limiting its innovation and inclusive capacity.”
Low integration of women in AI talent pools, it said, is a “significant missed opportunity in a professional domain where there is already insufficient supply of adequately qualified labour.” If not addressed soon, the Forum warned the gap could widen further.
Sarah Kaplan, the director of the University of Toronto’s Institute for Gender and the Economy, said Canada needs to do more to develop the diversity of the AI workforce because the technology has the potential to replace lots of human processes and decisions.
“If we don’t have a diverse workforce working in AI, we risk not only perpetuating existing biases, but actually amplifying them and leading to really negative outcomes for the most vulnerable people in our society,” she said.
Despite the country’s successes in AI, Wallis said Canada still needs to get better at scaling its technology and focusing on the enrolment of women in technology-related courses.
Aside from its announcements about the AI workforce, the Forum also revealed Monday that Canada ranked 16th in its annual gender gap ranking.
It marked the second year Canada placed 16th in the international organization’s list, which measures economic, educational, health and political disparities experienced between men and women in more than 100 countries around the world.
Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Finland took the top spots, but Canada ranked above Latvia, Bulgaria, South Africa, Switzerland and dozens of other countries.
When it comes to wage equality, Canada ranked 50th, behind the U.S., Germany, Thailand, Uganda and Ukraine.
The World Economic Forum said this year the global gender gap closed slightly, after widening for the first time in a decade last year.
The organization calculates that it will take 108 years to close the gender gap across politics, work, health and education, but 202 years to close the workplace gender gap.
