A new report from a human resources analytics firm found that artificial intelligence threatens to replace a disproportionate number of jobs typically held by women.
According to the researchers at Revelio Labs, their findings reflect societal biases that have trapped women in roles ripe for AI replacement, such as administrative assistants and secretaries.
Revelio reached his conclusions by identifying about two dozen jobs most likely to be replaced by AI, based on a National Bureau of Economic Research study. Then it identified the gender breakdown in those jobs.
Women held many of those jobs, it noted. These included bill and accounts collectors, payroll clerks and executive secretaries.
“Women, as well as people of color, are under-delegated in occupations that are repetitive in nature when it comes to tasks. This means they are going to be disproportionately affected by any jobs that are fully automated. are,” said Nicole Turner Lee, director of the Center for Technology Innovation and a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit public policy organization. Washington DC
“Those jobs have already seen a decline as a result of new technologies,” he told TechNewsWorld. “However, AI is more likely to be involved in roles where there is high repetition that can be automated. That automation often lends itself to low-level workers being ousted.
need people in the loop
Will Duffield, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, a Washington, DC think tank, explained that if more women are in computer-related jobs than men, they will be more affected by AI displacement. However, he was skeptical that all of the jobs listed in the Ravelio report required only repetitive skills.
“It seems ludicrous to expect paralegals to be replaced by AI,” he told TechNewsWorld.
“The same is true for copy editors and auditors because, at the end of the day, you need humans to avoid making mistakes,” he said.
“AI may make workers more efficient, so there may be fewer jobs,” he continued, “but the idea that jobs will be completely replaced is quite speculative and highly publicized.”
“AI has to become more reliable rather than just another tool in their repertoire to replace people, letting them decide how much to trust,” he said.
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“That’s not to say AI won’t be more reliable in the future,” he acknowledged, “but right now, it’s all pretty speculative.”
“There always needs to be some human in the loop to make sure the AI isn’t causing unnecessary biases or inefficiencies,” Turner Lee said. “You still need people to manage it.”
facing severe disruption
Ravelio’s warning about AI’s impact on women’s jobs parallels one issued by the International Monetary Fund in 2018. At the time, the IMF estimated that 11% of jobs held by women – a higher percentage of jobs held by men – risked elimination due to AI and other digital technologies.
In financial services, for example, women represent about 50% of the workforce, but they hold only 25% of senior management positions, according to a report by Boston Consulting Group. The report notes that senior management positions are generally insulated from shocks caused by automation.
Women employed in this sector predominate in clerical and administrative jobs that are at high risk of attrition, such as bank tellers, who are 85% female.
The pattern also holds true in female-dominated industries such as health care and education, which are less at risk from automation, the report said.
BCG predicted that AI will disrupt employment patterns in a big way in the coming years. It stressed that companies, governments and individual women must be prepared to invest in new skills for the new generation of jobs.
However, Duffield recommended that workers think about the present rather than the future. “For the worker, it is now much less worrying about what new job you should train for as AI will replace you, rather than how to learn how to use AI in the job you are doing now,” he said.
promoted job impact
Workers who adopt AI may be surprised by its productivity gains. “It’s saving my company time and money,” said Deidre Diamond, founder and CEO of CyberSN, a cybersecurity recruiting and career resource firm in Framingham, Mass.
“I haven’t replaced people,” she told TechNewsWorld. “I’ve been able to expedite projects, expedite work.”
Ida Bird-Hill, CEO and founder of Automation Workz, a reskilling and diversity consulting firm in Detroit, also praised her productivity gains using ChatGPT. “I wrote a proposal that normally takes 100 hours in 11 hours,” he told TechNewsWorld.
Tales of productivity gains, however, are being overshadowed by grim — and somewhat distorted — predictions about AI’s impact on the workforce.
Hoden Omar, a senior AI policy analyst at the Center for Data Innovation, a think tank that studies the intersection of data, said, “The news cycle includes a series of claims about generative AI systems Jobs will be affected.” Technology, and Public Policy, in Washington, DC
“The perceived impact varies wildly from outlet to outlet, but the central message of the news media is clear – AI is here to take almost all jobs, not just blue-collar ones, white-collar ones too,” he told TechNewsworld.
‘Hokum’ claims
Omar called many of the claims “hokum”. He cited a recent news article titled “OpenAI Research Says 80% of US Workers’ Jobs Will Be Affected by GPT.”
“The headline is eye-catching, emotionally resonant and easily repeatable, but it is narrowly true and broadly misleading,” she argued. “The figure comes from a research paper by OpenAI, but the paper does not say that 80% of jobs will be affected. It says the jobs of at least 10% of ‘about 80% of the US workforce’ could be affected.
“This means that the real statistic is that large language models may affect at least eight percent of the work in the US economy,” he continued. “Far less dramatic picture of research findings but more honest.”
Omar explained that the concern about AI taking jobs is based on the “lump of labor illusion”, the idea that there is a fixed amount of work, and thus productivity growth, such as from automation, will reduce the number of jobs. But the data tells a different story, he continued. Labor productivity has grown steadily over the past century – even if that growth has been slower recently – and unemployment is at an all-time low.
“It is becoming more and more difficult to wade through the hogwash of claims about AI, but if readers, and more importantly policy makers, are not prudent, they will make decisions based on unfounded fear or hype,” she warned.
