How disruptive technology could disrupt gender parity
Emerging technologies that will define the jobs of tomorrow could lead to fewer women in the workplace, a new report warns.
As jobs become more digitized and automated in the future, there’s a risk that the lack of gender parity could be exacerbated, according to a report by the World Economic Forum. Jobs that are commonly held by low- and middle-income women are the ones most likely to be disrupted by changing technology, according to WEF.
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“Without opportunities for re-employment and re-deployment into emerging roles, the share of women in the labour market could shrink further,” the authors wrote.
WEF worked with the LinkedIn Economic Graph Team to analyze real-time job data and uncover emerging roles. It identified eight emerging job clusters centered on different skill sets: content production, marketing, people and culture, and sales; and cloud computing, data and AI, engineering, and product development.
The job clusters indicate that roles requiring human interaction, and those requiring emerging technology, will define the “new economy” of the future.
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Gender parity is present in only two of these clusters, WEF found. Clusters that were based on disruptive technology skills, including cloud computing, engineering, and data and AI, were more likely to have a gender gap, according to the report.
Jobs in the people and culture, and content production clusters had the highest representation of women at over 60%, followed by marketing, sales and product development, which required slightly more disruptive technology skills.
Almost a third of workers in the data and AI cluster, the most disruptive one, were women, who account for 20% of engineering jobs and 14% of cloud computing jobs.
These clusters typically experience rapid hiring growth, but since 2018, none have increased the share of women by more than two percentage points, the report found.
Product development showed the most growth for women, with a 1.7-point increase, while the data and AI sector actually lost parity.
“Labour markets continue to exhibit persistent trends towards the segregation of occupations along gender lines. Professions in technology and, in particular, computing have proven to be prime examples of how organizational and professional cultures may cement gender segregation,” WEF wrote in the report.
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To get a sense of how likely it is for women to make an “ambitious job switch” into roles requiring more disruptive skills, the report examined the difference between jobs with little similarity between skills. Data and AI will likely be an in-demand cluster as almost half of both women and men transitioned into these roles even though they had a low skill match.
Men and women were equally likely to transition into marketing roles, with roughly one in five seeking these positions with low skill matches, and people and culture roles, at roughly one in 10.
Women were more likely than men to seek ambitious job changes in sales and content production roles. The report found that the biggest gaps for women are in fields where they are already underrepresented, including:
- Engineering, where fewer than 5% of women made a switch, compared to over 8% of men
- Product development, 14.5% of women transitioned, compared to almost 18% of men
- Cloud computing, where 9.3% of transitions were made by women, compared to 22.4% of men
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