According to researchers at Revelio Labs - a human resources analytics firm, artificial intelligence threatens to replace a disproportionate number of jobs typically held by women. Their findings reflect social biases that have funnelled women into roles ripe for AI replacement, such as administrative assistants and secretaries. “Women, as well as people of colour, tend to be delegated into occupations that are repetitive in nature when it comes to tasks. That means that they’re going to be disproportionally impacted by any jobs that are fully automated,” observed Nicol Turner Lee, director of the Center for Technology Innovation and a senior fellow in governance studies at The Brookings Institution, a non-profit public policy organization in Washington, D.C. “Those jobs have already seen a decline as a result of new technologies that have been introduced,” she told TechNewsWorld. “However, AI has a greater likelihood to engage in roles where there is high repetition that can be automated. That automation often lends itself to low-level workers being outplaced.”
Revelio’s warning about the impact of AI on women’s jobs echoes a similar one issued by the International Monetary Fund in 2018. At that time, the IMF projected that 11 per cent of jobs held by women — a higher percentage of jobs held by men — were at risk of elimination due to AI and other digital technologies.
In financial services, for example, women represent almost 50 per cent of the workforce, but they hold only 25 per cent of senior management positions, according to a report by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). Senior management positions are usually insulated from shocks caused by automation, the report noted. Women working in the sector, it continued, predominate clerical and administrative jobs that are at high risk of elimination, such as bank tellers, which are 85 per cent females. The report further highlighted that pattern holds true across even female-dominated industries, such as health care and education, which are less threatened by automation.
The BCG predicted that AI will disrupt employment patterns on a massive scale in the coming years. It asserted that companies, governments, and individual women must be prepared to invest in reskilling for the new generation of jobs.