As jobs are automated, will men and women be affected equally?

CONNECTING hat will the future of work look like for today’s young women as more tasks are automated — or even replaced — by artificial intelligence? How can leaders ensure that AI doesn’t lead to gender bias in their organizations? Recent research is beginning to answer these questions, and the outlook is mixed.

First, the impact of AI on work will be influenced by the distribution of women and men in particular jobs. While an AI tool may not be designed to replace the tasks of women or men in particular, many occupations are so skewed in their current distribution that waves of automation may be felt more by women, or by men, at particular times.

Because AI tools tend to automate tasks rather than whole jobs, many occupations will be affected unequally. While the gender distribution of occupations may shift over time, PWC has estimated that more wom

Wen than men will be affected by job changes between now and the late 2020s. This disproportionate impact on women is based largely on the high number of women employed in clerical occupations. These kinds of roles are being disproportionally affected by technological developments like automated assistants.

This picture changes over the medium term, however. As new AI capabilities develop, such as self-driving technologies, more men than women will be affected by job changes between the late 2020s and the mid-2030s. During those years, automation is predicted to lead to job losses in what are currently maleheavy industries, such as construction and transportation.

Second, consider that women’s current representation in jobs related to AI is unequivocally poor. According to 2018 data from the World Economic Forum and Linkedin, only 22% of jobs in artificial intelligence are held by women. This is an important disparity, because those who learn about, experiment with and implement AI technologies will be creating the tools that organizations use on a daily basis — and any unconscious biases baked into their decisions could have serious consequences.

Leaders of organizations using AI can help prevent the use of gender-biased tools by encouraging diverse technical teams wherever possible. Having more women developing tools may help teams spot unintentional gender biases, like training an algorithm on historical data that reflects gender inequality in who is hired or promoted.

There are substantial risks to navigate in the coming years, especially when women are judged using tools built on data from the world as it is, rather than the world as it should be. Leaders need to ensure that their organizations’ AI tools are helping to reveal female talent rather than accidentally overlook it.

At the same time, the underrepresentation of women in science and technology roles is occurring alongside an overrepresentation of women in roles that require emotional intelligence and advanced communication skills, such as speech pathologists and preschool teachers. Since skills like empathy and collaboration are among those that are hardest to recreate in AI tools, many of these occupations are likely to be safer from technological disruption.

Looking ahead, one happy possibility from the rise of AI is that people’s abilities to understand one another and work together may become more valued as technological tools overtake us in other areas.