Women workers facing robot threat
Automation is a bigger threat to women workers than men, a US study has found. Females are more likely than males to be knocked out of their jobs by automation in the next eight years, and will have half as many opportunities to land new positions unless there is a new effort to retrain them.
Those conclusions, from a study released at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, show about 57 per cent of the 1.4 million US jobs to be disrupted by technology between now and 2026 are held by women.
With proper retraining, most of the workers would find new, higherpaying jobs. Without it, very few have opportunities, but women fare the worst, according to the study, conducted in collaboration with the Boston Consulting Group.
“It is definitely unprecedented, the effort that would be required on the part of policy makers,” said Saadia Zahidi, one of the authors and head of education, gender and work for the WEF.
Workers are bracing for a future where it is estimated that each industrial robot displaces six employees and 30 per cent of banking jobs could disappear within five years as artificial intelligence gets smarter. Much of the worst disruption will affect lower-paying jobs which are often held by women or less educated workers.
The WEF now estimates it will take a century for women to reach gender parity in the workplace, almost 20 years longer than the organisation forecast a year ago.
The study looked at 15 job strategies that could pave the way for professions as diverse as assembly line workers, truck drivers, secretaries and cashiers for finding new careers. While the report found that 90,000 manufacturing jobs, predominantly held by men, are at risk of disruption, there are about 164,000 at-risk female secretaries and administrative assistants who are often overlooked.
“A lot of the narrative around job losses and reskilling in the US tends to focus around male, blue-collar, factory and mining workers, but in fact, there are a lot of women in a lot of those disrupted jobs,” Zahidi said.
“So there is a quite a lot of discrepancy in terms of the public narrative and what’s actually happening in the data. There is this possibility of blind spots.”