Women Are on the Firing Line as Automation Claims More Jobs
Two-thirds of jobs in developing countries are at risk from new technologies, and women will fare worse than men.
The conventional wisdom used to be that businesses in nations with low wages and growing labor pools would have less of an incentive to invest in robots and artificial-intelligence-enabled computer systems. No longer. Two-thirds of jobs in the developing world are at risk from new technologies, according to a World Bank report from 2016. And in Southeast Asia at least, women will fare worse than men, losing more of the existing jobs and landing fewer of the higher-skilled ones that emerge.
“That was what really stood out—women are really at high risk,” says Phu Huynh, a Bangkok-based economist with the International Labour Organization (ILO). He co-authored a study that concluded that 61 percent of working women in Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam are on shaky ground as new technologies become more pervasive.