I’m in the field. 8% is probably a generous estimate. I’d guess 5% is closer, but it’s easy to fudge numbers by including tangential business fields. One of my friend’s wife describes herself as “being in AI” because she’s on the sales team for the AI group. You could probably get close to 25-40% depending on how much you want to fudge.

The other answer here is just bad. From experience (and I have quite a lot) the 20% quoted in the article does not seem inflated. Attrition is much higher, and women are not well represented in management (particularly senior management), but that is a problem broadly in tech.

Women in ML are not unicorns; I work with them every day.