With the advent of intelligent automation capable of driving vehicles, sorting boxes and writing sports articles, certain professions are now under imminent threat. Curiously, those professions seem to be the ones predominated by men. In fact, linear trend suggests that about a quarter of all men at prime working age in the US will be out of work by mid-century.[1]While the fourth industrial revolution affects all sectors of work, it is worth noting that different sectors will be affected differently by automation. And since each of those sectors has distinctive gender composition, it becomes interesting to examine this phenomenon from a gender lens. How might automation alter gender disparity in the workforce?
The Mass Replacement of (Man)ual Labor
Manual labor has always been the primary victim of automation. Despite that, jobs in factories were not completely eliminated since robots were significantly constrained by their reliance on human operators and ability to only perform repetitive tasks in predictable environment. But now, with better sensors and artificial cognition, robots can be aware of objects in their surroundings and learnto do things they were not explicitly programmed to do.
A mobile phone factory in China recently replaced 90% of its human workforce with such robots and saw a 250% rise in productivity and an 80% fall in defects.[2]It is only a matter of time that others will follow suit. Similar trend can also be expected on the road. The White House predicts that almost all truck, taxi and delivery driver jobs will be automated in the near future.[3]Notice that these jobs are overwhelmingly male professions.
What about office jobs, where many women work as managers and secretaries? They are also under threat, but at a lesser rate. Due to its data processing and analytic capabilities, artificial intelligence will undoubtedly be present in offices. According to an Oxford study, some white-collar jobs, like secretaries and administrators, face over 90% chance of automation. However, the risk is much lower for managers, lawyers and many others.[4]Most office workers are generally equipped with higher level of skills, thus more adaptable.
For example, bank tellers were not made obsolete by ATMs. They just handle less transactions and market financial products to customers more.[5]In fact, professions such as tellers, cashiers and paralegals grew robustly as computer enhanced their work.[6]The nature of office work, where tasks are numerous and complicated, means that robots will take over some of the work but give way for workers to focus on other tasks better performed by humans. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about factory workers and truck drivers. At best, there will be a rising need for maintenance workers, but such jobs would be fewer and accessible only to highly-educated men. So in the foreseeable future, women and men who work in offices will be safe, but men who are blue-collar labors won’t be.
The Revaluation of Feminized Care Work
Another gender implication of recent automation is the potential rise of care work, which are overwhelmingly female.[7][8] These jobs, mostly found in healthcare and education, involve emotional sensitivity and delicate human interaction in a more unstructured environment. Citing from the Oxford report, such jobs face near-zero risk of automation, unlike male-dominated manual jobs. We still do not trust robots to educate our children and tend to patients after they wake up, so health and education technology will equip but not replace. This does not mean that robots will never be able to fully replace care workers, though. It only means that if it happens, it will be much later than automation in other fields.
The relatively brighter prospects of care work, coupled with the disappearance of manual jobs, might bring an unintended consequence: the migration of some men towards care work. Not only will this shake up the gender make-up in the field, more men might mean higher wages for everyone working there. A study found that when male workers enter predominantly female jobs in large numbers, such as computer programming (yes, programming was predominantly done by women), the increased supply of labor does not depress wages. Instead, the salaries and status levels of such jobs rise, even for the women.[9]Deep gender bias is mostly to blame; employers subconsciously value work done by women less and tend to pay work done by men more.[10]But when men start doing jobs previously done by women, the work becomes ‘masculinized’ and gets higher remuneration. So with men taking up care work, this gender bias might benefit women, though disparities would still be expected.
There will also be social implications. Society tend to look down at jobs like nursing, teaching and care-taking despite their indispensable value to society. That’s because traditionally, women were expected to do those nurturing jobs as part of their natural duty. The entry of men into the field can challenge this gender construct, and hopefully lead to more appreciation of traditionally feminine work in the form of better pay.
Crashing through the Glass Ceiling