All-male AI team at Norway's oil fund draws few female applicants

Norway's oil fund has an AI team of ten people, and all of them are men. The fund, run by Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM), is struggling to attract women to the group, according to reporting from NTB and E24 dated 11 October 2026.

When a position in the team was advertised in January, only 12 of the 119 applicants were women. 104 were men, and three did not state their gender. Fund chief Nicolai Tangen told E24 the week before that the lack of women on the team is "awkward" ("kleint"). He explained that it has been hard to find skilled women to work on artificial intelligence, and said the applicant numbers reflect this. He is looking for female employees for the team but says few apply.

Communications chief Line Aaltvedt told E24 that the fund is "of course not satisfied" with the share of women in the AI team and would have liked more female applicants for the AI positions. She said NBIM recruits according to need, based on the tasks the team is to solve. Positions are advertised through the fund's ordinary recruitment process, run together with HR.

The case matters because it shows the gender gap in AI work reaching one of the world's best-known investment funds. The fund's own leadership publicly acknowledges the imbalance and links it to the makeup of the applicant pool. The article does not describe any specific new measures to change this.