VANCOUVER—A report on the future of automation suggests that women could be at a greater risk of losing their jobs but will be better positioned to transition to new growth sectors.

The RBC Economics report found that women are at greater risk of “technological disruption” because they hold the majority of jobs that use more “generalist, digital and social” skills, which are threatened by automation. That’s an estimated 3.4 million positions, about 35 per cent of all Canadians jobs at risk of being replaced.

The report points to bookkeeping, reception and data-entry as positions that traditionally employ a higher number of women. Artificial-intelligence technologies aim to do some of the same tasks in organizing and analyzing data.

But the findings also showed that the skills honed in lower-skilled, lower-paying jobs, such as critical thinking and customer service, are also used in growth sectors that have a lower risk of being replaced. These sectors include health care, human resources and education.

In other words, “women may be better positioned than men for the jobs of the future,” stated the report.

“It doesn’t mean you just walk in the next day and you’re working in that field, but it certainly gives you the building blocks that are required for you to move over,” said Dawn Desjardins, deputy chief economist at RBC and report co-author, who called the skills overlap “encouraging.”

It means workers shouldn’t always feel they need to acquire new skills if they need to change jobs, she added.

“People are naturally nervous, in some cases where they do see automation taking place within their industry or their role, so we’re trying to say, ‘Yes, that obviously is something that is going to be a tenuous situation, but think about the skills that you have been able to develop in that role and then use that as a starting point.’”

Women are also at a higher risk of losing their jobs because there are fewer women in senior positions, according to the report.

The study found that the discrepancy was most obvious in management, indicating that men are more likely to be in such positions and at an earlier age than women, while looking at workers aged 20 to 39.

Part of the reason is that women and girls don’t start acquiring managerial skills at a young enough age, Desjardins said. The discrepancy “compounds” over a person’s career and becomes harder for women to “catch up.”

“That is something we have to pay close attention to, to ensure that women get to move up in terms of those numbers … Whether it’s some kind of policy-driven initiative or setting up that formal mentoring so that we get women just moving up.”

Christin Wiedemann, president of software consulting firm Radical I/O Technology in Vancouver, has an optimistic outlook. She said automation could mean that lower-paying jobs are replaced by higher-paying, more stimulating jobs.

“Automation taking jobs away is not necessarily a bad thing,” Wiedemann said.

“Both in academia and in various areas of IT (information technology), I’ve definitely experienced that women are under-represented in leadership and executive positions ... There are systematic problems in our society where we don’t have diversity … There is bias in hiring, there is bias when we promote people, and there’s a lack of female role models.”

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Wiedemann agrees with the report on the need for more Canadian labour market data that focuses on how women are represented in different industries and types of positions.

The study is based on data from a number of different sources, including: Statistics Canada, Employment and Social Development Canada, the Occupational Information Network program in the U.S. and findings in a previous RBC Economics report called “Humans Wanted.”

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