Long-established
barriers make it harder for women to make transitions. Women have less time to
reskill or search for employment because they spend much more time than men on
unpaid care work; they are less mobile due to physical safety, infrastructure, and legal
challenges; and have lower access to digital technology than men. In order to
help women, make these transitions, policymakers and businesses need to step up
interventions, targeted at women, to overcome these barriers.
High priority
interventions include more investment in training and transitional support; more
provision of childcare and safe and affordable transportation; addressing stereotypes
about occupations; boosting women’s access to mobile internet and digital skills
in emerging economies; and supporting women entrepreneurs.
Some evidence
suggests that women could be more likely to face partial automation than men. Using
the United States as an example, they found that approximately half of the occupations
that are mainly held by women are less than 50 percent technically automatable by
2030, compared with about 20 percent of occupations largely performed by men. If
this pattern holds across countries, women could be at less risk than men of seeing
their jobs replaced in their entirety by machines but could be more likely to experience
a fundamental change in their jobs.
As digital platforms
that enable independent work to become more prominent, women’s working lives (and men’s)
could change in three ways:
1. Work
activities may shift in importance and could increasingly involve collaborating
with automated systems. As machines increasingly handle routine physical and
cognitive tasks, women could spend more time managing people, applying expertise,
and interacting with stakeholders. In an emergency room in 2030, for instance, health
workers could spend less time doing clerical work (due to the adoption of preregistration
by mobile phone, computerized checkout and billing, and AI-led diagnostic tools),
and physical work, but more time interacting with patients.
2. Certain
skills could become more important. By 2030, jobs in Europe and the United
States could require up to 55 percent more time using technical skills and 24 percent
more hours using social and emotional skills. Time spent using physical and manual skills
and basic cognitive skills could decrease as those activities are automated.
3.
More women could work flexibly. Co-location
with colleagues is an important part of working lives today, but technology could
reduce the need to co-locate as virtual work becomes more widely adopted, for instance.
The rise of these new, more flexible ways of working is particularly helpful to
women because they disproportionately carry the “double burden” of working for pay
and working unpaid in the home.
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