The working methods are evolving at an unprecedented speed. Digitization, artificial intelligence and machine learning contribute, through automation, to the disappearance of many repetitive tasks with little or moderately specialized.
According to a recent study, this trend towards automation will particularly harm women.
On average, the risk of job loss due to automation is 11% for women and 9% for men. Automation is losing many jobs for men, but we estimate that 26 million women in 30 countries are at high risk of losing theirs in 20 years due to technological advances. According to this study, the probability of their jobs being automated is 70% for women, which represents 180 million jobs worldwide.
Gender equality in the workplace requires understanding the effects that these trends have on the lives of women.
Increased risk for women
Hard-won gains from measures to increase the number of women in the paid workforce and promote pay equity between women and men could quickly vanish if women were confined to sectors and jobs most exposed to automation.
Women aged 40 and above and those in administrative, service and sales positions are at disproportionate risk.
Almost 50% of women with at most a high school diploma are at high risk of losing their jobs due to work automation, compared to 40% of men in the same situation. For women with an undergraduate or graduate university degree, this risk is 1%.
Opportunities and obstacles
Women are currently underrepresented in areas where employment is growing, such as engineering and information and communications technology. In the technology sector, women are 15% less likely than men to hold managerial or supervisory positions, and 19% more likely to hold positions of clerks or service workers, performing more tasks. repetitive, hence a high risk that their employment will be terminated for technological reasons.
What can we do today to guarantee the participation of women in the economy without giving up on the automation of work?
It is more important than ever for women to break the “glass ceiling”. According to analysis, differences in the repetitive nature of tasks exacerbate gender pay inequality. Even taking into account factors such as skills, experience and career choice, almost 5% of the gender pay gap is due to the more repetitive nature of the tasks performed by women. In the United States, this translates into a net loss of income of $26,000 over a woman’s entire working life.
It’s not all dark, however. In advanced and emerging countries, where population aging is accelerating, employment is likely to increase in female-dominated sectors such as health and social services. Jobs in these industries require cognitive and interpersonal skills that are less suitable for automation. Managing an aging population will require both an increase in the human workforce and an increased use of artificial intelligence, robotics and other advanced technologies to complement the work of health and boost their productivity.
In the context of automation, the urgency to establish fairer rules of the game is increasing so that women and men have an equal chance to contribute to the prosperity of an increasingly world oriented technology and take advantage of it.
Reference: https://hbr.org/2019/07/will-automation-improve-work-for-women-or-make-it-worse
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