Automation and AI are destroying jobs, not work
The future of women at work: Transitions in the age of automation
To weather this disruption, women need to be skilled, mobile, and tech-savvy, but women face pervasive barriers on each, and will need targeted support to move forward in the world of work. A new McKinsey Global Institute report, The future of women at work: Transitions in the age of automation, finds that if women make these transitions, they could be on the path to more productive, better-paid work. Our current research breaks new ground by adding a gender lens to that work, and by looking at a broad range of effects on women’s jobs including potential job displacement, opportunities for job creation, the changing nature of jobs, and a quantitative assessment of the transitions that women will need to make to capture these new opportunities, including implications for wages and average education levels. In India where so many women work in subsistence agriculture, losses in this occupational category could account for 28 percent of jobs lost by women, compared with 16 percent of jobs lost by men. Today, women are well represented in the second, but underrepresented in the first in many countries; in Canada, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States women have lower representation in the professional, scientific, and technical services sector compared with their average share in the economy.
As partial automation becomes more common and other technologies, including digital platforms that enable independent work become more prominent, women’s working lives could change in three ways: As machines increasingly handle routine physical and cognitive tasks, women could spend more time managing people, applying expertise, and interacting with stakeholders. At the same time, a higher percentage of employed women work in the two lowest paying occupational categories-elementary occupations and clerical support work. In emerging economies, education of girls and women has improved markedly in recent years, suggesting that women should be better positioned now than in the past to take advantage of shifts in labor demand. A range of flexible work options are even important for women because many more of them take on paid and unpaid work. Globally, men are 33 percent more likely than women to have access to the internet; that gap worsens when focusing on women in poor, urban communities.
Barriers to women working in the gig economy, including worries about lack of digital and internet skills and physical safety, need to be addressed, as does the lack of social protection for such workers that may expose women to income insecurity. Finally, more can be done to address the funding gap faced by women entrepreneurs, as part of a broad effort to encourage women actively to create technology and work in new ways.
Demographics and Automation
We argue theoretically and document empirically that aging leads to greater automation, and in particular, to more intensive use and development of robots. Using US data, we document that robots substitute for middle-aged workers. We then show that demographic change-corresponding to an increasing ratio of older to middle-aged workers-is associated with greater adoption of robots and other automation technologies across countries and with more robotics-related activities across US commuting zones. We also provide evidence of more rapid development of automation technologies in countries undergoing greater demographic change. Our directed technological change model further predicts that the induced adoption of automation technology should be more pronounced in industries that rely more on middle-aged workers and those that present greater opportunities for automation.
Both of these predictions receive support from country-industry variation in the adoption of robots. Our model also implies that the productivity implications of aging are ambiguous when technology responds to demographic change, but we should expect productivity to increase and labor share to decline relatively in industries that are most amenable to automation, and this is indeed the pattern we find in the data. Pdf format from SSRN.com for electronic delivery. If you usually get free papers at work/university but do not at home, you can either connect to your work VPN or proxy or elect to have a link to the paper emailed to your work email address below. Gmail and other free email addresses will not have access.
E-mail: A non-technical summary of this paper is available in the July 2018 NBER Digest.
Digital Marketing Strategies: Data, Automation, AI & Analytics
The proliferation of new technologies such as mobile, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence have transformed customer behavior and disrupted marketplaces – both for B2B and B2C markets. As a result, our marketing practices must also evolve. Digital Marketing Strategies: Data, Automation, AI & Analytics is much more than marketing through digital channels. In this online program by Kellogg Executive Education, you’ll gain an end-to-end perspective of the modern marketing process. Applied Learning Opportunity: Let’s put these theories to work in practice.
Throughout this program, you will work on a Marketing Transformation Challenge. You will identify a business challenge that you would like to solve with a marketing solution. Ideally it’s a solution that you could apply in a real-life situation, making the exercise inherently practical. MOHANBIR SAWHNEY McCormick Foundation Chair of Technology Clinical Professor of Marketing Director of the Center for Research in Technology & Innovation Professor Sawhney is a globally-recognized scholar, teacher, consultant, and speaker in business innovation, modern marketing, and enterprise analytics. He has written seven management books, as well as dozens of influential articles in leading academic journals and managerial publications.
His most recent book, The Sentient Enterprise: The Evolution of Business Decision Making, was published in October 2017… More info. After successful completion of the program, your verified digital certificate will be emailed to you in the name you used when registering for the program.