Female employees are at risk of robotic displacement

More women than men are at risk of getting their jobs displaced by automation and this will likely result in a wider gender gap, a World Economic Forum report said.

The report, which analysed nearly 1,000 jobs across the US, was released at the Davos conference.

Fifty-seven percent of the 1.4 million US jobs at risk from technology and other factors between now and 2026 are currently held by women.

“The narrative tends to focus on male, blue-collar factory workers, for example,” but there are also a number of very female-dominated roles like secretaries and administrative assistants that are facing displacement.

For example, nearly 164,000 female secretaries are at risk, compared with 90,000 at-risk male assembly line workers.

Aside from manufacturing and administrative jobs, service sector workers are also at risk of being displaced by automation.

Amazon has just opened the doors of Amazon Go in Seattle, a cashier-less grocery store that uses apps and high-tech sensors to track shoppers and their purchases. The development threatens retail salespeople and cashiers, the two most common jobs in the US, employing 7.8 million.

Nearly three quarters of salespeople and cashiers are females.

According to the WEF, reskilling is the way to cope with these tectonic changes in the job market. Learning new skills will increase employees’ chances of re-employment. It will increase their wages and improve social mobility.

But while the WEF report used only data from the US, a similar story for the rest of the world is happening.

In emerging economies in Southeast Asia, women make up the majority of labor-intensive manufacturing jobs. In Cambodia, 88 percent of garments workers — four fifths of whom are women — face displacement through automation, according to a report from the International Labour Organization.

“Worryingly, many of these female workers come from rural areas and are breadwinners of their families,” said Jae-Hee Chang, co-author of the report.

“Our study showed that technology would impact vulnerable groups of society the most: low-skilled, women, youth and less educated.”

Policy-makers then would have to consider the effects of automation on workers and how they can acquire skills and education to move to other jobs.

Johannes Moenius, chair of the Institute for Spatial Economic Analysis, which released a report last year mapping out who would be hit hardest from automation, says education is indeed vital.

“It’s absolutely key that people are aware that we have entered a time where continuous education, lifelong education is not just political lip service… it’s a requirement for people simply to earn a living.”

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