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by Alicia Wallace, CNN — June 23, 2023.
MINNEAPOLIS – More working-age people than ever before are being hired in the United States.
The labor force participation rate for women aged 25 to 54 hit a record high in April and May, recovering from the pandemic’s “surrender” and returning to its pre-pandemic way of achieving historic gains in the labor market.
All of this can be replaced with AI.
Generative AI technologies like ChatGPT have potential for the hard-work market, exposing most of the country’s jobs to automation, according to Goldman Sachs economists. The technology can create new content, such as text, images, audio, video, and code. of educational knowledge that includes examples of the desired outcome.
However, recent studies show that while they outnumber men in the U. S. workforce, they are still outnumbered. In the U. S. , women would likely be disproportionately affected by companies’ adoption of generative AI: A recent study estimates that 79% of women who lead (nearly 59 million) are in jobs that are more likely to be disrupted and automated. That’s compared to 58% of men who execute, according to studies from the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler School of Business.
Estimates that only 8 in 10 employees may be affected “are just staggering,” said Julia Pollak, leading economist at online task market ZipRecruiter. “That said, and I think many of us appreciate it intuitively, it will be less difficult to automate some of those workplace tasks than it will be to automate carpentry jobs, electrician jobs and pest removal jobs, many of those manual and production tasks, which are much more masculine.
She added: “I think there are valid reasons to get involved in that some of the gains that women are making would possibly erode, at least temporarily. “However, he also noted that “these technologies will create many, many opportunities. “
A higher percentage of female runners are hired in white-collar jobs, while for men, it’s more of a 50-50 split between white-collar and blue-collar jobs, said Mark McNeilly, professor of marketing practice at Kenan-Flagler. School and leader of AI research. Some of the professions most exposed to AI with a predominantly female worker base are the workplace and administrative support; fitness practitioners and technicians; education, education and library; health care support; and social networks and services, according to UNC Kenan-Flagler research.
“It probably wouldn’t be like ‘I lose my job,'” McNeilly told CNN. “I think it’s really a question about whether there’s anything the user can do to go up value. “
Working women face much greater effect from the latest AI (think GPT), report says
In the years leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic, women’s labor force participation rates grew faster than those of their male counterparts, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Those gains were a confluence of several points, Pollak said. These include: female-dominated industries, such as care and physical care, were among the fastest developing industries; the educational level of women has increased considerably; And women have also made greater foray into historically male-dominated fields, such as construction, agriculture, repair and maintenance.
In February 2020, the labor force participation rate for working-age women was 77 percent, below the dotcom record of 77. 3 percent, according to BLS data.
But in April 2020, that rate dropped to 73. 5% when the pandemic froze the U. S. economy, forcing more than 20 million people to lose their jobs. However, as the country recovered in the coming months, women did not return to the same grades as men.
The pandemic has affected the leisure and hospitality, education and fitness sectors, where women make up the majority of the workforce. In addition, job losses and lackluster job recovery in the childcare sector have hampered workers’ ability to return to work. market; And since day-to-day care jobs fall to women, they have been held back more as school has become a home-based job.
Eventually, the tide turned.
The top 3 drivers of women’s market access are access to child care, market payment and flexibility, said Dana Peterson, lead economist at The Conference Board, an organization of business clubs and studios.
And the recovery from the pandemic has propelled those catalysts to hypervelocity.
Jobs, in general, have less rigidity: teleworking is more common and the fact of working from home has allowed greater flexibility in schedules. This advanced access to daycare with schedules that made it less difficult to drop off and pick up, as well as businesses that provided on-site child care. And shortages of hard work, largely related to accelerating demographic trends of baby boomers leaving the workforce, prolonged Covid and fitness issues, are helping to drive up wages, especially for low-paying jobs.
“Some of those things are more prevalent and favor more women in the workforce,” she said.
In addition, female-focused sectors, such as physical care, recreation and hospitality, continue to record some of the most powerful employment increases over the past two years.
“That’s where a lot of hiring happens, and that’s also where a lot of the wage increases happen,” Peterson said. It makes sense that women gravitate toward those sectors and are more willing to work. “
Last month, the hard-working force participation rate for seniors ages 25 to 54 hit a new high of 77. 6%, surpassing the previous record of 77. 5% set last month, according to BLS data.
Revelio Labs, which specializes in publicly collecting and analyzing workforce data, recently learned about the occupations most exposed to AI and the gender and ethnicity distributions among them. Reverio’s research showed that AI-exposed positions with the highest percentage of women included billing. and account creditors (82. 9%), payroll and accounting clerks (79. 7%), executive secretaries (74. 3%), word processors and typists (65. 4%) and accounting clerks. accounting and auditing (65%).
In the professions most exposed to AI, they make up 71% of employees, said Ben Zweig, CEO of Revelio.
“Sometimes in the verbal exchange about AI, we take a perspective, which is a false perspective, that the task composition of a task is static, that a task is a task and has constant responsibilities,” said Ben Zweig, executive leader. Jobs are turning all the time.
AI represents both an opportunity and a threat, and it depends on the industry, Peterson said.
Generative AI may not have the existing ability to return to a patient or insert an IV, but it can also prove useful for scanning billions of imaging data to diagnose a disease.
On the other hand, AI can become destructive and threatening to any highly “automatable” role, Peterson said.
“The challenge with AI is that it’s not perfect; It generates new content from existing content,” he said. “You still want a human being to create existing content that they can build from. It’s smart: you want someone to look at it and see if it makes sense.
For companies, there are valid risks, in addition to making sure apps are used responsibly and that potential considerations about bias and ethics are fully understood and addressed, he said.
“Over time, it will upgrade some jobs, but as with all the other kinds of technological advancements we’ve had, other people have figured out something else to do,” he said. “Yes, it can destroy jobs in the short term, but it also creates new jobs and other opportunities. This is helping other people be more productive in their current jobs. »
At Montana State University, Dr. Sara Mannheimer, who earned her PhD in Library and Information Science, works with a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services and leads a team of researchers to explore how AI can be used ethically. in libraries and archives.
“Librarians think a lot about comparing data and thinking about reliable resources and resources,” he said, noting that the knowledge that AI occasionally drives comes from the internet. “ChatGPT uses knowledge from Reddit and Wikipedia and who knows what else, and [these are] known to be primarily used, edited and involving men, and more commonly white men. Therefore, the data that emerges from [these technologies] is biased and not accurate.
While AI assignment does not particularly address the implications for the task market, especially for library workers, Mannheimer is aware of what this generation may mean for her and others in her field.
“The library can’t be replaced through a machine, there will be jobs that a human will have to do,” he said, adding that if AI can take care of the responsibilities from the heart, “I think there are a lot of jobs for librarians. “and library staff to do so. It requires critical thinking. “
Houston-based comedian and freelance Meredith Nudo remains keenly aware of the potential disruption of AI in her work, especially in dubbing work.
Voice actors like Nudo are avoiding attempts to upgrade AI-created voices. Organizations like the National Association of Voice Actors have developed rules and a crusade to teach followers about the issue.
Nudo has a clause in its popular voice employment contract stating that its task will be used to exercise AI and is starting to include a similar clause for its writing, especially after it has been hired with homework opportunities to teach AI to write or edit more effectively.
“It was a strange and surreal experience to be asked to exercise what was necessarily my replacement, and it was like saying you’re not smart enough to rent [for] the task you’ve enjoyed and been exercised for,” he said. saying. .
Nudo said he sees opportunities to work with AI for certain responsibilities, such as note-taking and transcription, which can waste time and space for other responsibilities that require more work, creativity and critical thinking.
“If we didn’t have to worry about meeting our own fundamental needs, I think we’d see a lot more people lending themselves to technology,” he said.
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