Women and the Future of Work

Training drivers and providing jobs through its related women-for-women ride sharing social enterprise in India, Azad Foundation shows how non-traditional gig economy jobs can offer women new economic opportunities while challenging gender norms and stereotypes. (Photo courtesy of Azad Foundation)

There’s a growing consensus that women’s economic empowerment is necessary to drive global growth and sustainability. Yet governments and companies around the world have done little to respond to how the changing nature of work will impact women differently from men. Despite a wealth of research on gender and on the future of work through the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution—and even some research bringing these topics together—not much is changing in practice.  

In our view, there are three reasons for this apparent lack of action. First, much of the existing research focuses on broad impacts of changing work environments on women in the United States and Europe. There is little guidance for companies and governments active in other (very different) areas. Second, much of this same research focuses on the macroeconomic level, rather than on building practical programs and policies. Finally, both companies and governments often operate in silos, with women’s empowerment in one department and issues related to future work in another. Whatever the reason, failure to apply a gender lens to strategies that address the impact of technology on workers and workplaces runs the risk of undermining private- and public-sector efforts to advance women’s economic empowerment and drive sustainable development more broadly—including progress toward a range of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It also will mean missing out on opportunities for women that new technologies present.

Future Risks to the Female Workforce

The most commonly cited risk to women through automation and artificial intelligence is job loss, due to the concentration of women in lower- and middle-skilled jobs (such as manufacturing and clerical jobs). A recent IMF staff discussion paper examining 28 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries, plus Cyprus and Singapore, concluded that in the next two decades, automation will replace 11 percent of the female workforce (who tend to perform more routine and codifiable tasks), compared to 9 percent of the male workforce. That means 180 million female jobs are at high risk of displacement globally. Meanwhile, a 2016 ILO study predicted that some Asian nations could lose more than 80 percent of their garment, textile, and apparel manufacturing jobs, as “sewbots” replace humans in factories. This would disproportionately affect young women, who comprise a majority of the 9 million people dependent on jobs in those sectors.

The risk that technological advances will have a greater negative impact on women than men is aggravated by the current lack of women in STEM jobs, as well as the low percentage of girls and women who are training in STEM fields. UNESCO reported in 2017 that women represent only 35 percent of all students enrolled in STEM-related fields of higher education, and only 28 percent in the critical information and communications technology field. Without an intentional focus on women and girls, skilling and re-skilling programs companies or governments provide will likely disproportionately improve job prospects for men. To encourage more women and girls to enter STEM fields, we must shift social norms and attitudes that define certain occupations as “male” or “female” using a localized, holistic approach to women’s economic empowerment.

More broadly, a global gender digital divide has been growing in certain regions. According to the IEEE Internet Initiative, the proportion of women using the Internet is 12 percent lower than the proportion of men using the Internet worldwide. In the least-developed countries, only one in seven women uses the Internet, compared with one in five men. And across urban poor areas in 10 cities—including Lagos, Nairobi, Jakarta, and Bogotá—women are 50 percent less likely than men to be online, and 30-50 percent less likely than men in the same communities to use the Internet for economic and political empowerment. The root causes of this difference are high costs, lack of digital know-how, scarcity of relevant and empowering content for women, and barriers to women speaking freely and privately online. Bridging this digital divide will again require localized, holistic approaches to address the specific concerns of women and girls that limit their Internet use.

This digital divide is particularly troubling in a world where technological competence increasingly impacts a wide variety of jobs. According to a 2017 study by the Brookings Institution, the use of digital tools has increased in 517 of 545 occupations since 2002 in the United States alone, with a striking growth in many lower-skilled occupations. For instance, while women have historically dominated the care professions—a growing field in many parts of the world—patient monitoring and reporting, as well as other tasks involved in those professions, increasingly involve the use of technology. The overall effect of this divide is that women will have greater difficulty accessing training, jobs, and resources that require Internet access—whether to learn new skills, work at jobs remotely, or access credit or markets.

Opportunities for Women in the Future World of Work

Of course, technology also presents opportunities for women to move into and advance in the workplace by gaining new skills and opportunities—in some cases leap-frogging into previously inaccessible jobs. Sometimes working remotely allows women to accommodate responsibilities at home while still taking part in the formal economy. In other cases, particularly where social norms or the risk of violence limit women’s mobility, technology can connect women to online education and job opportunities. In India, for example, Pratham Education Foundation has been using a variety of Internet-connected technologies to support its vocational training for young women. Similarly, Internet connectivity is providing more and more smallholder farmers, artisans, and other entrepreneurs with information, new markets, and sources of credit—benefits that can also give women working from home or in remote locations new sources of income or higher earnings.

Alternatives to formal employment offered by the gig economy—such as opportunities for women drivers, as ride-sharing services expand globally—also provide women with new sources of income combined with flexibility. Many of these non-traditional jobs also play an important role in helping shift gender norms. This is particularly true when technical training is accompanied by education on legal rights (for example, relating to harassment, violence, and sexual and reproductive health) and work with communities—a holistic model used by the highly successful Azad Foundation in India and many other local women’s organizations.

This type of holistic, “building block” approach to economic empowerment is important to achieving sustainable development for everyone, as embodied by the SDGs. Until we shift social norms that keep women from fulfilling their economic potential—including those relating to women’s role in doing unpaid care work, and those that accept gender-based violence and harassment—women’s increased labor force participation will not translate into true economic empowerment, with equal rights and access to opportunities to fulfill that potential. Indeed, as researcher Charles Kenny recently put it:

In a modern economy, gender differences in employment are overwhelmingly driven by policies and norms rather than any innate differences between men and women in average suitability. That implies the gendered impact of technological change on the labor market will primarily depend on the interaction of changing demand for particular jobs and skills with evolving norms and policies regarding the role of women and men in work and in the home.

Meanwhile, emergent technologies are also opening opportunities to enhance women’s economic position in fields that are traditionally female-dominated, including eldercare, childcare, nursing, and other care professions. Access to and training in new technologies has potential to preserve, expand, and improve jobs for women in these increasingly tech-reliant fields.

Finally, to ensure that women truly reap the new opportunities technology offers, we need to reframe what constitutes work, and what types of social protection policies and infrastructure we need to protect workers in this new world. Policies and programs relating to issues like parental leave, childcare, pensions, and harassment must change to ensure that they support women working in informal settings or from remote locations. At the same time, governments and companies need to continue to focus on equal pay for equal work; indeed, a recent study of Uber reflected a 7 percent gender earnings gap among drivers.

What Leaders Can Do  

Ensuring that women are not left behind and instead benefit from the opportunities technology affords will require that governments, companies, educational institutions, and civil society act in concert. Business leaders and public policy makers in particular can:

• Gather gender-disaggregated data, for example through pay-gap dashboarding, and put a gender lens on all training, re-skilling, and up-skilling programs to ensure that more women and girls have opportunities to move into jobs of the future.

• Help shift views of women in STEM and tech jobs, and more broadly in non-traditional jobs. This includes showcasing female role models in various settings—in educational settings, in workplaces, and through advertising. Local women’s organizations, such as Azad Foundation and Sakha Cabs in India, are leading the way.
• Support programs for STEM education for girls and specific “right-skills” training programs for women. The Tech She Can Charter is an example of businesses coming together in the United Kingdom to advance this agenda, while local women-led partners like STEMbees in Ghana help ensure that STEM education not only incorporates skills and mentorship, but also addresses other locally relevant issues like digital safety for women and girls.
• Build or advocate to build social protection programs to ensure that all work—whether formal or informal, full-time or part-time—is treated equally in terms of wages, pensions, parental leave, health care, and childcare programs, and that these programs and social infrastructure address the particular needs of women and girls in various contexts.
• For companies, fill gaps in government programs to help reduce the unpaid care burden on women and help shift gender norms through paid parenting and eldercare leave, provision of childcare facilities and subsidies, and encouragement of men to take on unpaid care burden through strong paternity-leave programs, as companies like Starbucks and Patagonia are doing.
• Support women entrepreneurs by sourcing talent from women-owned businesses around the world, as many companies are doing in partnership with WeConnect International.
• Share evidence and strategies—especially from settings outside of the United States and Europe—to understand and address the impact of future work on women’s livelihoods and lives.
• Explicitly recognize and champion the importance of women’s economic empowerment in its own right, as well as the role it plays in achieving economic growth and decent work (SDG 8) and the broader sustainable development challenges reflected in the SDGs. This means communicating and reporting publicly on the link between SDG 5 (gender equality), SDG 8, and the other SDGs in government policy documents and company annual reports; setting explicit objectives, and monitoring progress accordingly.

It is encouraging to see many companies and governments building wide-ranging strategies to economically empower women across value chains and geographies. By taking some of these simple steps, they can ensure that their strategies are forward-looking. By recognizing the potential impact that the changing nature of work will have on women and girls in the workforce of the future, and by incorporating a holistic approach in understanding what it takes to truly empower women economically, companies and policy makers can help advance women’s economic empowerment in ways that are transformative for women and foster sustainable development for all.

Read more stories by Marissa Wesely & Linda Midgley.