Last year the World Economic Forum (WEF) coined the phrase the fourth industrial revolution for the sweeping changes technology is set to make to our world. This revolution will irrevocably alter our fundamental concept of work, and our ability to trade time and skill for money. This is not something we’re waiting for though; it’s happening right now.

McKinsey and Company recently reported that of the 2,000 work activities they examined, 45% “could be automated using already demonstrated technology.”

The WEF also identified that women would be more affected by the coming changes than men.

“In absolute terms, men will face nearly 4m job losses and 1.4m gains, approximately three jobs lost for every job gained, whereas women will face 3m job losses and only 0.55m gains, more than five jobs lost for every job gained.”

Women, however, are not a homogenous group, and the changes will not be spread evenly across the female population.

For women with transferable skills, the fourth industrial revolution could be a boon, as technology and dismantling of the traditional eight-hour office day makes flexible work, new careers and start-up opportunities more accessible. Furthermore, those skills traditionally associated with women, including caring and empathising, may become more highly prized in the workplace, which could be a plus for female workers.

The nature of work for women is also hopefully going to undergo a seismic shift, as the momentum of the feminist movement continues to push women further into what were once male-dominated industries and positions of leadership.

Those women already in disadvantaged groups, however – older women, women lacking education or formal qualifications, rural women and immigrant women – could have a very difference experience. Their existing disadvantages will be compounded by diminishing opportunities for unskilled work, and higher barriers to upskilling.

Additionally, many female-dominated industries are going to be altered by the increasing automation of what used to be labour intensive fields, like sales, nursing and administration.

Yet coming to grips with the future of work for women requires a clear understanding of the current barriers facing working women.

Changing women’s work

Current ABS data shows the highest ratio of women’s employment is in clerical and administrative jobs (76% female), followed by community and personal services (68% female) and sales workers (64% female).

Despite the high numbers of women employed in those areas, more than three-quarters of women in these jobs earn less than the average salary for their sector.

The reasons for this are split evenly between women being predominantly employed on a part-time or casual basis, and men taking most of the senior (and therefore better paid) positions. In addition to skewing the pay rates, these factors also mean women are more exposed to job losses when low-skilled and repetitive tasks are automated.

That WEF report predicts two-thirds of the expected 7.1 million job losses over the next five years will occur in office and administration areas, as self-serve checkouts, online sales, and automated bookkeeping processes become more widespread

Following this trend, it seems likely that working women with low or limited skill sets are at immediate risk of long-term unemployment, with few options for retraining or alternative career paths.

A good example of this is the fast food industry, which employs nearly 200,ooo people in Australia – 55% of whom are women and 65% of those women are employed on a casual basis.

In 2012 Momentum Machines built a robot that can make, wrap and bag 360 individually customised hamburgers in an hour. As Momentum Machines co-founder Alexandros Vardakostas told Xconomy: “Our device isn’t meant to make employees more efficient. It’s meant to completely obviate them.”

Technology to replace low-skilled or repetitive jobs is not something we’re waiting for; it has existed for years. All we’re waiting for is the rate of uptake to increase. And while there might be more job opportunities in designing new hamburger-making robots, it seems unlikely that many women employed to sling burgers are going to make an easy jump to robotics engineering.

At the other end of the scale, 57% of professional workers are women. While there is still a significant gender skew in senior and full time roles, jobs requiring specific skills and creative thinking are, at least in the short term, less vulnerable to automation.

40% of Australia’s medical practitioners are women, but they are under-represented in positions of seniority

In the longer term, however, even highly skilled professional jobs are at risk.

Five years ago, IBM’s supercomputer, Watson, played a game of Jeopardy against two human champions, and won. At the time, it wasn’t much more than a novelty, perhaps a hint of things to come, but not a serious threat to human creativity and employment.

Since then, Watson has grown up, studied medicine and is now a faster and more accurate diagnostician than human doctors. Unlike humans, Watson does not ever get tired or bored, it does not make mistakes of overconfidence or bias, it doesn’t specialise in only one field, thereby missing symptoms outside its area of speciality, and it is always up to date with the latest medical discoveries.

Additionally, while it may have been hugely expensive to develop, it is cheap to replicate and can operate anywhere in the world, without ever needing food or sleep. No human, regardless of talent and knowledge, can match this.

Around 40% of Australia’s medical practitioners are women, but they are dramatically under-represented in positions of seniority and areas of high speciality and ground-breaking research. As with fast food workers, this makes female doctors vulnerable to job losses due to automation. It may take longer for computers like Watson to permeate the medical field than it will for robots to take over fast food kitchens, but, without significant structural change in the medical profession, the end result will be the same.

The same vulnerabilities exist in accountancy, the law, and even creative industries, like advertising and media.

For instance, Watson is not just a doctor, it’s also a lawyer. American law firm Baker & Hostetler recently announced it would be using Watson’s technology in its bankruptcy practice, which currently employs around 50 lawyers. Another artificial intelligence system recently predicted the outcome in human rights cases just by reading the case text. While researchers were quick to say that AI wasn’t replacing judges any time soon, this sounded more like reassurance for nervous judges than a statement of ability.

Last year Associated Press said it was “automatically generating more than 3,000 stories about US corporate earnings each quarter, a tenfold increase over what AP reporters and editors created previously”. Sports reporting is also a growth area for automated journalism.

Earlier this year McCann Japan’s “Artificial Intelligence Creative Director” designed an ad for Clorets breath mints, in competition with a human. Consumers narrowly preferred the human ad, and much of the actual design work was done by humans, but creative AI is still in its infancy. The potential for replacing human work, particularly in analytical targeting, is endless.

While the number of women in these professions is slowly increasing, senior and full-time positions are dominated by men. And again, this makes women more vulnerable to inevitable job losses.

Stem as a growth area

Seventy-five per cent of the fastest growing jobs in Australia require science, technology, engineering and maths (Stem) knowledge and skills. Australia is not producing enough workers with these skills, which makes this a potential area of opportunity for women.

Women are historically absent from Stem fields. Roughly 30% of Stem graduates are women, less than 30% of Stem jobs are held by women and the gender pay gap in the Stem fields is also around 30%.

But the pressure to increase the number of women in Stem fields is growing, with government programs and industry initiatives gaining strong support.

And this appears to be having some effect. The number of women with Stem qualifications increased by 23% between 2006 and 2011, whereas the number of men only increased by 14%.

Programs designed to encourage young women to enter traditionally male areas like coding, engineering and robotics are also growing. Rail Girls Summer of Code pays a stipend to women and girls contributing to open source code. Code the Future is offering programs for primary aged girls to learn and innovate with technology, while Tech Girls Movement is dedicated to supporting girls interested in Stem careers. Grassroots organisations like these are also supported by federal government programs designed to support greater diversity in Stem.

Entrepreneurs

Another area of positivity is in small businesses and start-ups. While women are still only around 34% of all business operators in Australia, this number has increased by 46% over the last 20 years, one of the few areas of significant growth for women. And this trend is continuing, with 44% of people who started a small business in 2013 were women.

Encouragingly, this group has strong representation of migrant women, women with disabilities, rural women and older women, the groups most likely to be affected by job losses in the fourth industrial revolution.

A common barrier for entrepreneurs is capital costs, but this is an area where technological advances could make a significant difference to women. The ability to create and sell products to a global market, which would once have required expensive shop fronts and significant marketing costs, can now be as simple as setting up an Etsy store and a craft table in the corner of the lounge room. This is not a small thing. Eighty-six per cent of the nearly 1.4m Etsy sellers are women, and 76% of them consider their work on Etsy a business. Indeed for 30%, it is their sole source of income.

This ability to create locally and sell globally with very little up-front investment is entirely a product of the digital age and it will be a major source of job growth for women in coming years.

Encouragingly a recent study of middle market firms (where revenue is between $10m and$1bn) by Dun and Bradstreet found “the number of all middle market firms increased by 4% from 2008 to 2014, yet the number of women-owned middle market firms rose by 24%”.

As with the Stem support programs, entrepreneurial women in Australia are banding together. Networking groups like Leaders in Heels and Business Chicks, and angel investors like Scale and SheStarts, have a huge following. They provide seed funding, advice, connections and practical assistance for women with innovative ideas who need help to get their businesses off the ground.

The WEF report identified the three most common barriers to gender parity as unconscious bias from managers, lack of work-life balance, and lack of role models. The underlying cause of all those issues is the insidious persistence of gender roles, and our expectations of how both men and women will conform to outdated stereotypes. Unless this is addressed the future looks bleak for women, regardless of automation.

Past and future gender roles

Women of the future are not optimistic about their career prospects. A recent survey by Our Watch and Plan International found that 90% of girls aged 15 to 19 do not think they are treated equally to boys, only 14% think they have the same opportunities to get ahead in life as boys, and 41% say lack of support will make them re-evaluate whether to start a family.

They have some basis for their fears. Despite increasing public debate about women’s economic disadvantage, the overwhelming pressures of rigid gender roles and workplace practices have remained relatively immune to change.

Prof Janeen Baxter has been studying the attitudes to women’s roles at home and work for many years. She says gendered expectations of parenting roles have become more, not less, conservative since the 1990s. She ascribes this to the difficulties parents have managing the demands of work and families, where the rhythms of the workplace and childcare are still very much out of sync. Infrastructure and services have simply not caught up with the expectation that women should not be denied economic and professional advancement when they have children. Baxter says that without significant pressure on government and business, this mismatch of the services needed and those provided will not change.

As these unmanageable pressures force parents to divide rather than share work and family roles, they fall back into traditional gender assignments.

This pattern of splitting family roles along gendered lines both creates and reinforces the perceptions that women’s professional skills and abilities are not as valuable as men’s. Women are supposed to be gentle and nurturing, men are driven and authoritative, and deviating from those expectations is perceived as both a moral and personal failure.

To quote the WEF report:

While in nearly all industries and geographies there has been a marked shift away from deliberate exclusion of women from the workplace, there continues to be cultural beliefs that lead to unconscious biases. This includes perceptions that successful, competent women are less ‘nice’; that strong performance by women is due to hard work rather than skills; and assumptions that women are less committed to their careers.

If women are going to protect themselves from inequitable disadvantage in job losses due to automation, these gendered expectations need to change. This requires significant shift attitudes to and from men, as well as women.

Valuing men as caregivers, subordinates, and part-time workers will have a twofold benefit. Firstly, it removes the assumption that women are primarily caregivers, and secondly, it provides men, who are also going to experience deteriorating employment opportunities, with an alternative means of finding identity and self-worth outside work.

This is the most fundamental change necessary to achieving gender equity in the current and future workplace.

Around 85% of fathers and 19% of mothers with children under five work full time

The Australian Workplace Gender Equality Agency puts the current full-time-equivalent gender pay gap at around 27%. As shocking as this is, even this figure doesn’t tell the full story of women’s systemic economic disadvantage, brought about by unequal responsibilities for childcare, endemic bias against women achieving senior positions, and persistent inequalities in remuneration.

The total average weekly cash earnings (which includes part-time as well as full-time workers) in 2014 was $1,430 for men and $940 for women. Thus, the real gender pay gap, if you look at how much money women earn in comparison to men, is around 50%.

The reason for including part time work in gender pay gap calculations is that the realities of most women’s working lives do not include ongoing full-time work.

Around 85% of fathers and 19% of mothers with children under five work full time, and more than 70% of working women in Australia in 2014 were employed part time. In the part-time workforce, less than 9% of men care for dependent children, while more than 60% of women do. Despite this, women are paid significantly less than men in the part-time workforce, and this discrepancy only increases with age.

Melbourne University’s Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey study shows that a staggering 40% of women of working age are not in the workforce at all, and nearly half of those women cite caring for children as the reason they’re not working. By comparison, only 25% of working age men are not in the workforce and only 6% of them ascribe this to caring for children.

The sum of all these statistics paints an unarguable picture of women bearing the full brunt of the lost economic opportunity inherent in raising children. That women are already so far behind men in terms of earning ability and career progression makes the threat of automation and concomitant job losses much more serious. These are the barriers that must be overcome just to reach a level playing field, and alarmingly, it needs to be done as the pressure of millions of job losses loom over everyone.

The long-term cost of this is far more significant than the simple diminished earning capacity during the childcare years. It demonstrates a lifetime of career disadvantage, and the impact on superannuation, savings, wealth creation and most particularly on housing, leads to women at high risk of poverty in old age.



Factoring in the pressures on the job market likely to occur over the next five to 10 years, women are at significant risk of becoming permanently deprived of the ability to create an economically secure life.

The known unknown

Predicting the future is tricky. Technological advances, unimaginable only 20 years ago, are now prosaic, and humans are endlessly inventive and adaptable. Despite all the gloom of the current outlook, we can’t discount the possibility of currently undreamed-of innovation making radical changes to society and our expectations of the future.

Without such an intervention, however, the future of work for women could be grim. The gender roles of the past do not fit with the realities of the present, let alone a future where opportunities for work are going to be very limited. Ensuring that women have an equal role in the future of work will require significant attitude changes for both men and women.

We already know this, the only thing we don’t yet know is whether these changes can happen quickly enough to protect women from a very disturbing future.