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A new war on women?
Artificial intelligence is having an outsize impact on female-centric professions, a new study suggests.
A report from the nonpartisan think tank Brookings Institution and the Centre for the Governance of AI, a policy research firm, revealed that people who work in women-dominated fields are more vulnerable to the threats of AI on the workforce.
Researchers looked at which occupations have the biggest risk of being impacted by the tech, based on a mix of public and private data, and how employees in these fields will come out of it.
Of the 37.1 million US workers most at risk of losing jobs due to AI advancements, 26.5 million have “above-median adaptive capacity,” meaning they are best positioned to transition to a new job if need be.
However, about 6.1 million employees — 4.2% of the workforce in the sample — are likely to have a hard time adapting due to factors such as older age and limited savings.
According to the data, these workers are mostly concentrated in clerical and administrative roles — and about 86% are women.
“These are occupations that have been under attack for a long time,” Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told CBS News.
Muro emphasized that these statistics reflect the vulnerability of the roles of women-dominated careers, not their competency.
“It’s a bit more about what women do in the economy rather than what they are,” he said.
Meanwhile, the roughly 70% of workers with adaptive capacity would likely be able to change to a new job with a comparable salary, according to the researchers.
Sam Manning, a senior research fellow at the Centre for the Governance of AI, said these employees are in fields such as marketing, finance and science, which tend to require a more diverse set of skills and have more technical and managerial roles.
“There’s a wider range of things that you need to leverage in [these jobs], versus some of these more administrative, back office-type roles where the core competencies are more narrowly defined,” he told CBS News.
Manning and Muro both suggested that employees learn more about using AI in case they need to plan a professional pivot.
“Trying to experiment with this technology to see how you can make yourself more productive and expand your capability set to stand out within whatever field you’re in is definitely something that can help,” Manning said.
