Source: Revelio Labs

Hey Everyone,

I am obsessed with the future of work, it’s a topic on A.I. Supremacy that we’ll be talking about again and again.

A.I. isn’t just going to change the future of work and the tasks we let A.I. do at work, it’s going to change how we find a job, how we get promoted, how we pivot careers and so forth. One of the best kept secrets about A.I. and job disruption is how it will impact pink-collar workers, that is, jobs traditionally done more by women to a marked degree. If you have read me during the last decade, you will know that I’ve been warning about this for years.

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What does the future of work hold for female professionals and older women in the labor force?

Customer success folk, executive secretaries, payroll clerks and yes human relations associates! I have a warning for female dominated positions, A.I. is coming for your job! I’ve always been concerned and warned about this Pink collar of job disruption phenomenon, but there’s finally enough data to see how it will play out in the Service sector in the next twenty years.

While artificial intelligence is seeding upheaval across the workforce, from screenwriters to financial advisors, the technology will disproportionately replace jobs typically held by women, according to human resources analytics firm Revelio Labs.

In 1950, men made up more than two-thirds of the workforce, according to a report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). However, throughout the 1960s, '70s, '80s, and '90s, the gender gap steadily closed, with women making up nearly half of the workforce now. In many countries today, Universities have a higher percentage of women and in developed countries many women are more educated their male counterparts.

However, a lot of fields are still slanted by gender participation for various reasons. If you crunch the data it turns out women will fare less well than men in how A.I. takes on various tasks and makes some jobs obsolete altogether. A.I. isn’t just changing how we get jobs and are promoted, it will change the kinds of careers we choose when we are young.

While more young men are attracted to be daily active users of ChatGPT, who do you suppose will benefit first and the most from rapid A.I. adoption?

The Study

At least according to the economists Hakki Ozdenoren.

These sorts of studies are not new, we’ve known this for decades, and with LLMs it’s even more clear that A.I. will develop pretty good soft and social skills much sooner than was anticipated! Revelio Labs identified jobs that are most likely to be replaced by AI based on a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research. They then identified the gender breakdown of those jobs and found that many of them are generally held by women, such as bill and account collectors, payroll clerks and executive secretaries.

A.I. Adoption and Gender

While young men are prone to looking into “hacks” of how things like ChatGPT can help them do two jobs or start a new businesses, what will happen to all the women in customer service, service and administrative roles who just work to live and don’t live to work? And as we talk about things like “A.I. regulation”, why aren’t we as a society asking these sorts of questions?

Advances in AI are aggravating gender disparity in the global workforce, where companies are considering cutting some staff and leveraging generative AI in their workflow. International Business Machines Corp. (IBM, recently said it’s slowing down hiring for roles that can be easily replaced by AI in back-office functions, such as human resources. Chief Executive Officer Arvind Krishna predicts as many as 30% of these positions could be replaced by automation over five years, potentially resulting in a loss of around 7,800 jobs.

A.I. Will Hurt our Most Vulnerable

In the technology layoffs and “efficiency drives” of the 2020s, this is just a precursor to technological automation. In society, people like Single mothers, women of color and women with less education will be dispropritily hit by all of this fancy automation and A.I (still not so sophisticated by the way). Chalk it up to historical powers of automation and change in society? Sweep it under the rug?

Women are already paid significantly less, even for the same job! In 2023, women are earning 77 cents for every dollar earned by White men. The gender pay gap has barely budged in 20 years.

What professions are women dominating? Traditionally, women worked as teachers, nurses, and secretaries. Here's a list of the top 10 female-dominated occupations, according to the most recent data from the BLS:

You’ll notice that many female dominated jobs have awfully low pay rates too with very defined glass or bamboo ceilings and caps!

What Jobs are the Most Female Predominant?

1. Preschool and kindergarten teachers

Female workforce: 97.6 percent

Median pay: $29,780 (preschool) and $57,980 (kindergarten)

2. Dental hygienists

Female workforce: 97.1 percent

Median pay: $74,820

3. Speech language pathologists

Female workforce: 96 percent

Median pay: $77,510

4. Dental assistants

Female workforce: 96 percent

Median pay: $38,660

5. Childcare workers

Female workforce: 94 percent

Median pay: $23,240

6. Secretaries and administrative assistants

Female workforce: 94 percent

Median pay: $38,880

7. Medical records & health information technicians

Female workforce: 93.6 percent

Median pay: $40,350

8. Dietitians and nutritionists

Female workforce: 93.1 percent

Median pay: $60,370

9. Hairdressers, hairstylists, and cosmetologists

Female workforce: 92.1 percent

Median pay: $24,830

10. Medical assistants

Female workforce: 90.6 percent

Median pay: $33,610

Even in the 2020s we think nah it would be impossible to disrupt nurses, teachers and childcare workers right? We’ll soon reach a point where that will no longer be the case. It won’t just be administrative assistants and customer service jobs at risk. Any financial, legal and medical clark could be at risk soon. How many of those jobs do you suppose are done by women?

The Pink Collar Workplace Meets the Machine Economy 2024 to 2044

As it turns out and according to the study by Revelio Labs, as reported by Bloomberg, AI is more likely to take over repetitive jobs, the kind that are mostly held by women.

For example, OpenAI Inc.’s ChatGPT model can search, review and summarize large volumes of text quickly, tasks that would normally take paralegals much longer to accomplish. In recruitment, AI can automate the process of sorting through resumes, a task that used to require more people, Ozdenoren said.

But it doesn’t mean that other highly-skilled workers can feel secure about their jobs. Preliminary research also shows that generative AI may impact high-wage occupations more than non-traditional manufacturing jobs, according to Revelio Labs.

“Moving forward, providing retraining opportunities will be key for women to navigate the evolving job landscape,” Ozdenoren said. “By doing so, we can capitalize on the potential of AI while leveraging their valuable skills and expertise,” he said.

Even on Substack here which is a supposed equal opportunity platform, female writers who write in culture, literature and so forth having the lowest subscription rates (low prices) and will struggle the most to gain readership. Why do you suppose that is?

How will young women adapt in the Machine Economy even as women are having less children (or none at all) and youth unemployment in places like China is now nearly 21%? Who does an A.I. first society really benefit?

How Covid-19 impacted women at work was a good example of how society values women and their careers. Not only are women paid less, they have more unpaid work and caregiving burdens. The number of women in the workforce in February was higher than pre-pandemic levels for the first time, according to the latest jobs data in March, 2023.

How A.I. impacts women is actually directly related to how Capitalism and inflation is no longer working for young people and how a more education female population has created a coming demographics winter that will wreck havoc on things like healthcare, GDP and economies that depend on consumer spending. You want productivity? You are going to have to think things through as a society. Giving women equal rights and equal pay would be a nice start.

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The Machine Economy of A.I. Voices

The fast-food chain Wendy’s is partnering with Google to train an AI model that knows what ‘biggie bags’ and ‘JBC’ mean. The fast-food chain has plans to bring its first “Wendy’s FreshAI” enabled drive-thru to a Columbus, Ohio, restaurant in June. The fast food service industry is just one example of how A.I. and robots are coming for those pesky service jobs.

The chatbot will be able to take verbal orders from customers who line up at Wendy’s drive-thru kiosks, all with the hope that it will help reduce long wait times. Wendy’s worked with Google to build a tailored chatbot on top of the company’s existing large language model (LLM).

Meanwhile how search works in the next decade likely won’t be a Google search engine bar, many experts believe A.I. assistants will be the next big thing. Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates is warning that AI assistants could soon make search engines like Google Search obsolete by profoundly altering the behaviors of users online. I wonder if he’s tried TikTok’s Tako?

Tech giants are desperately trying to push themselves into a beneficial pole position to have a chance to become the defacto AI-powered landing page of the internet and I’m fairly sure they don’t consider the impact of their technologies on women as a whole. They have no incentives to care about the consequences of their lucrative profiteering from a period of A.I. euphoria.

What most likely happens is a lot of women in their middle age will be basically unemployable in high-tech cities of the future. This will significantly degrade their financial stability in retirement. Nothing pushes you into a state of technological loneliness quite like poverty. The Machine Economy 1, Women 0. So who speaks up for these women of the future? Women already pushed to the edge of food stamps and rising costs of housing?

Will Generative AI Disproportionately Affect the Jobs of Women?

Kenan Institute in April, 2023 looked at this too.

Main Finding

The main finding of this analysis is that eight out of 10 women (58.87 million) in the U.S. workforce are in occupations highly exposed to generative AI automation (more than 25% of the occupational tasks) vs. six out of 10 men (48.62 million).

Overall, 21% more women are exposed to AI automation than men even though men outnumber women in the workforce. This is due to the affected occupations being populated by more women than men. “Highly exposed” means 25%-50% of the tasks in that occupation could be automated by generative AI.

This finding was determined using Goldman Sachs’ “The Potentially Large Effects of Artificial Intelligence on Economic Growth” as a base. The report identified 15 occupations that would be most affected. Within those occupations, the total number of employees and the gender breakdown determined the total number of men and women exposed to generative AI automation.

The reason more women than men are exposed to AI automation is straightforward: A higher percentage of working women are in white-collar jobs (~70%) vs. blue-collar ones (~30%) while for men the ratio is roughly 50/50.

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Some will adjust better than others. There will be winners and losers. Given that many women do a larger amount of unpaid work, who do you suppose as the discretionary time and motivation to adapt better?

TL;DR

Women will have to adapt more if A.I. really does disrupt more jobs faster. Thus almost 80% of women in the workforce are in occupations exposed to automation via generative AI vs. 58% of men. Waiting for the world to change? It’s really Machine vs. Women. And for social equality, wealth inequality and the health of capitalism and healthcare, I think it’s bad news.

It’s not a fair world or even close to it. A.I. won’t make the world better if it cannot even address the biases in our current system, but actually augments them too. The women in tech movement hasn’t changed things, Venture Capital is still led by older white males and as a consequence the impact of A.I. is also set in motion in a somewhat nefarious way.

Those wealthy male Venture Capitalists and Executives, the so-called decision makers of an era of A.I. boom, won’t walk in the shoes of women, not one day of their lives. Neither will the Politicians and policy-makers. Frankly, I worry for those left behind in the coming Machine economy.

Thanks for reading!