A Gender Lens on The Future of Work

However, changes in gender relations may not only rule out a return to domestic work in the face of job shortage but may also be shaping access to newly created jobs in ways that are not easily predictable. It is women who have taken the majority of new higher skilled jobs over recent years in the OECD and that trend could continue. There are still reasons to be concerned about the impact of new technologies on gender equality. Some of the important props that have supported women’s careers, such as maternity leave, may come under threat with a trend toward less stable employment relationships and gig-economy working. Job shortage may intensify competition for jobs and thereby require those that secure a post to work longer hours, even if job shortages and rising productivity should prompt policy interventions to support job sharing and shorter working weeks. Perhaps the only upside of the predicted disruption to labor markets materializes is that it should provide an opportunity to rethink how work and labor markets are organized and enable a move toward more gender-equal sharing of wage work and unpaid care work, accommodated by an overdue trend toward shorter, not longer, full-time hours and more rights to combine care and work. Whether or not that opportunity will be taken depends on political will and not on the technology itself.

Predictions about the future of work abound. A Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) is said to be a process that will result in major job displacement. The most well-cited predictions tend to be the gloomiest, such as Frey and Osborne’s estimate that 47 percent of U.S. jobs are at risk.1 The impact of gender is unclear: the World Economic Forum expects the burden of job loss to be relatively even, with women facing 48 percent of the total job loss and men 52 percent, while PwC estimates for 29 OECD countries show that although women are more at risk in the short term, by the third wave of change 34 percent of men’s current jobs may be at risk compared to 26 percent of women’s jobs.2,3 Estimates vary in part because some predictions focus on automation of tasks and others on whole jobs, with the more optimistic predictions assuming that not all tasks within a job can or will be automated.

Predictions of job loss by gender assume that losses will be directly proportional to the current gender share of tasks, occupations, or sectors. Thus, the PwC report considers women to be relatively protected by the importance of currently non-automatable personal and social skills in sectors such as health and education where women are concentrated. A similar method has been used by the author of this article to assess the gender impact of recession and austerity.4 As the future is unknown, extrapolating from the present might appear to be a reasonable methodology but predicting longer-term trends is more problematic for several reasons. New technologies are not the only driver of change and the gendered future of work requires consideration of the factors that have shaped and are reshaping current employment patterns by gender. Recent decades have witnessed sustained change in gender relations and in women’s position within employment, the household, and wider society.5,6 In this dynamic context, a static model of gender relations is inappropriate; indeed any downturn in demand for women workers can be considered to be depriving women of their future expected job gains as they seek equality in the labor market with men.7 However, the potential for mass unemployment of men during 4IR means we cannot take for granted that there will be no return to the practice of giving men priority in the labor market. The last time this happened—after two world wars—men and employers combined to ensure it was women who retreated from the labor market into domestic work.8

Thus, to provide a gender lens on the future of work, we need to consider three main issues: first, what are the factors shaping women’s participation in paid work and how susceptible are these factors to change in a context of mass technological job displacement. Second, what factors account for the gender segregation of both paid and unpaid work and how is this likely to change in the future. And third, how will some of the specific changes in working conditions associated with 4IR impact on gender equality. These topics are explored in the next three sections.

The Future of Work and Women’s Participation

In most advanced countries there has been a persistent ratcheting up of women’s participation in paid work over recent decades. This has been fueled by a combination of factors, including changes in patterns of labor demand, women’s education and skills, fertility, the burden of domestic work, and in consumption patterns, to name but a few.9,10 What has become increasingly clear is that although women’s participation may be stimulated by rising demand, it is not readily reversed in demand downturns; indeed evidence suggests the recent financial crisis strengthened women’s engagement in the wage labor market.11,12,13 There are several interconnected reasons for these trends being non-reversible (refer to Humphries and Rubery for this theoretical position).14 First, the change in consumption patterns at both a societal and individual level that accompanies a switch from unpaid domestic work to paid work may not be reversible. Adding unpaid domestic labor to maintain standards of living may not be feasible due to factors such as the demise of domestic skills, increased efficiency in finished goods production, changed social norms and tastes with respect to consumption and higher prices for basic goods, such as when cloth for dressmaking is sold primarily for those doing it as a hobby. For individual households, for example, commitments to mortgages or rents based around two earners are medium to long term, leading to pressures for both partners to remain in the labor market.15 A second change is in women’s own aspirations and expectations, evidenced by their increased investment in education even when the costs of education rise. By investing more in education, women may be seeking to use qualifications as a means of protection against discrimination in the labor market. A third factor is that women may even be the preferred labor supply source in periods of technological change and restructuring, as we discuss in the next section. Thus, far from women’s participation declining in the recent financial crisis, their commitment was maintained or increased, in part due to an added worker effect following men’s job losses but also because women may no longer see themselves as a contingent labor supply.16,17,18

These historical trends suggest that even if the major predicted job losses materialize, there is unlikely to be a major reversal of women’s engagement in wage work. That is, women are unlikely to retreat into the home to provide a “solution” to a problem of job shortage. This does not mean that in some countries and communities there would not be pressure to give preference to men in a context of severe job shortage, but this approach may be unsuccessful as well as patchy. Even if there were policies such as a universal basic income—discussed further below— to enable women to focus on care work, labor market turbulence might limit the rate of withdrawal as it becomes riskier to rely on one breadwinner. For all these reasons, women can be expected to continue to move rapidly toward forming around half of the active workforce. Men may still provide a higher volume of wage work by working longer hours, but the key issue for gender equality in a context of job displacement is whether this could provide an opportunity to push for reduced working hours to share work more equally and enable a more equal gender division of wage work.19

The Future of Work and Gender Segregation

The capacity of women to stay employed depends also on the demand side and thus on gender differences in access to employment. Gender segregation remains a feature of all OECD labor markets and it is this variation in distribution that underpins gendered predictions of job loss. However, that pattern is itself dynamic so that predictions that extrapolate from current patterns may be flawed. It is important to both distinguish between likely patterns of job loss and patterns of access to new jobs and to recognize the multifaceted drivers of gender job segregation. This provides a basis for understanding the scope for employer and societal choice in developing strategies that may promote or modify gender segregation by occupation, organization, sector, and contract.

With respect to job loss, women may be considered more vulnerable due to their concentration in lower skilled and/or routinized jobs that may be more easily automated. Piasna and Drahokoupil found significant gender gaps of 18 to 20 percent in the shares of men and women across the EU in plant and machine operator and assembly jobs requiring repetitive movements or short tasks of less than a minute.20 However, the prediction of greater job loss may be modified by three countervailing tendencies. First, displacement may apply to tasks or to whole jobs. If the outcome is to reorganize all jobs rather than displace particular job types then even the short-term outcomes are more uncertain. If task displacement raises the skill level of jobs, this is often assumed to disadvantage women. We address the issue of more technical skills below, but if the retained tasks require interpersonal skills, gender stereotyping might favor women over men. This links to the second countervailing tendency, namely that many low paid women’s jobs are far from fully routinized but involve a relationship or emotional labor dimension that cannot be readily be provided by new technologies. This factor has been recognized, but the persistence of this type of work in service jobs may be underestimated.21 A recent report on prospects for retailing suggested that, for high-street retailing to survive against competition from online retail, it may have to enhance not reduce its customer service provision.22 Thus, service jobs may be initially displaced for cost saving but may be subsequently reintroduced to bring more of the human factor back into service delivery. Third, as women are relatively lower paid, cost incentives to invest in new technology in female-dominated occupations may be weaker. Slower displacement can be expected in these sectors, as has applied in past waves of technological innovation where less automated processes co-exist with the more automated and compete on a different basis, whether based around personal/human factors, small scale, and artisanal characteristics or simply through similar unit costs due to lower wages.23

Access to new jobs by gender cannot be expected to simply replicate the existing pattern of gender segregation. The skills and experience of the female labor supply are changing rapidly so that gender educational gaps, still evident in some countries for older cohorts, will quickly disappear. Women have indeed benefitted more than men from recent waves of growth in higher-skilled work; OECD data show that women gained 8 million out of the 12 million skilled jobs created in the EU from 2003 to 2015.24 This pattern has also applied in the immediate past with around two-thirds of the jobs in the first three occupational categories going to women over the period 2011 to 2015 compared to a female share of these occupations of 47.8 percent in 2011, as shown in Table 1 below.25 These changes are associated with both women’s higher investments in education and with processes of job restructuring, such that many previous male-dominated professions are now either mixed or even “feminized,” even if women are still excluded from the top jobs.

Table 1: Changes in Women’s and Men’s employment in EU28 Countries 2011 to 2015 Thousands of people

Source: Based on Piasna and Drahokoupil (2017): Appendix Table 2

This process of change in gender segregation has been particularly notable in the United States where women’s recent job growth is apparently concentrated in male-dominated industries.26 Reskin and Roos’s analysis of job queues and gender queues provides a framework for understanding such changes in gender segregation. Women can be expected to move up the gender queue that ranks applicants by their appropriateness for jobs because of their changing characteristics—more education and more continuous work experience—but also because employers may look more favorably on women if they need skills associated with women workers—interpersonal skills, for example—or consider women could have a positive impact on the client base, such as when women had opportunities to enter real estate jobs in the US because women started to buy houses.27 The jobs women enter may also be moving down the job queue particularly if processes of restructuring and technological change encourage employers to seek to reduce the pay and status of an occupation. The outcome is thus often first a period of desegregation of male-dominated jobs, followed by either the feminization of the whole occupation or the emergence of new feminized subdivisions within the occupation.28,29

If we apply this framework to the future of work under 4IR, the scope for variations in the impact by gender expands. For example, if a high-level job is being restructured with the aim of reducing costs, employers may prefer to substitute women for men on the grounds that new practices and lower pay levels may be easier to introduce for groups that do not expect the traditional high pay and status associated with the profession. The scenario may work in the opposite direction; men may increase their interest in a job if the routinized areas are displaced and there is more, rather than less, scope for skill, discretion, and high pay. While the direction of change is uncertain it is highly likely, nevertheless, that gender will play a part in structuring the change process.

Access to jobs, however, depends not only on technological impacts but on employment policies pursued by the state, by employers and/or by competitive male workers (categorized as defensive measures by Muzio and Bolton).30 If, in a period of job shortage, competition for jobs increases pressure to work long hours, women may lose out even if they are equally competent. However, this outcome is not due to technological change but to a lack of restraints on how employers organize recruitment and work in contexts where trade unions and labor laws are weak. This suggests that the labor-market institutions, social norms, and government policies toward restructuring will influence the gender impacts of occupational and sectoral restructuring under 4IR.31 Where social norms supported by strong trade unions and traditions of collective regulation act to limit working time and promote job sharing, gender impacts of new technology are likely to be different than where employers are left free to shape the pattern of change. Gender segregation in jobs is not only shaped by women’s care responsibilities; many female-dominated jobs, such as in healthcare, are not known for being family friendly. The culture of the sector and the organization also play a role, and if technology is as disruptive as predicted, in principle this should offer major opportunities to change work cultures. The question is whether there is a will to put in place policies and strategies to open up job choices by gender or whether policies of deregulated labor markets will continue, leading potentially to further polarization.

The potential for countries to respond differently to these challenges can be seen by comparing policies in Germany and the UK. In Germany, both the government and the trade union movement set up commissions on the future of work, designed to explore how to “preserve or even strengthen our vision of quality jobs and decent work (gute arbeit) in an era of digital transformation and societal change” and to “seize the opportunities offered by digitalization and translate them into innovations, a better quality of life and security.”32,33 Policies proposed include widening collective bargaining coverage and extending social partnership, investing in skills as preventative measures against the risk of job loss, extending social protection to cover gig economy workers and developing a “working time choice” act to combine flexibility with regulation. Although these are mainly proposals, there is some evidence of changes along these lines already being made. The recent German metalworkers’ collective agreement allows everyone to reduce to 28 hours of work at particular life stages.34 In contrast, the UK government is planning to do very little with respect to changing labor market practices to address the potential changes. It has set up an industrial strategy that endorses the need for good work but leaves it up to employers to deliver. Its main proposed interventions are on skills and training, even though it has abolished the only body that looked at future skill needs: the UK Commission on Employment and Skills.35 On working time, it is actively facilitating the UK’s culture of long hours through negotiated opt-outs from the European Working Time Directive. However, although Germany is developing a policy approach that takes more account of societal interest including gender equality, it is also the case that the impacts in male-dominated sectors such as metalworking will be greater as these are the areas of German trade unions’ strength.

The argument made so far is that women’s changing patterns of both education and work leave the likely outcome of 4IR on gender segregation unclear and that predictions must be treated with skepticism. However, the elephant in the room is women’s lower involvement in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects and STEM-related occupations. These represent one of the few areas where women’s progress has been in reverse. Table 2 shows that, in the OECD, women’s engagement in higher education in all subjects—math, physical sciences, life sciences, as well as health and welfare, arts, and social sciences—is very significant, accounting for 40 percent plus and often more than half of all tertiary education students in the subject areas.36 The anomalies in this respect are engineering, construction, and computer science.

Table 2: Share of Tertiary Qualifications in OECD Countries Awarded to Women, 2000 and 2012

Source: OECD (2014) Indicator A3: Web Table A3.3

These differences cannot be explained simply by differences in abilities; girls could outperform boys at STEM subjects but might specialize in other subjects where the performance gap may be even greater. Moreover, overall gender gaps vary with some countries, such as Iceland, recording higher overall performance for girls than boys in mathematics.37 Social class also appears to matter more in STEM subjects as few girls from lower-income families choose these subjects in the UK.38 A further problem is that even those girls or women who study STEM subjects are much less likely than similarly qualified men to pursue careers in these subject areas. This suggests the issues lie not only within education but in work cultures in STEM-related areas, which may not be welcoming to women or accommodating to their needs for flexibility.

The Impact of New Technologies on Gendered Differences in Working Patterns and Conditions

Up to this point, we have considered how women’s strengthening attachment to wage work and the dynamic changes in gender segregation of employment make the gender effects of new technologies even more uncertain. New technologies, however, may still pose specific challenges to current achieved levels of gender equality or open up new opportunities for equality. We discuss these possible specific effects with respect to five areas of employment conditions:

Continuity of employment and maternity leave

Interrupted careers have a major negative impact on gender equality. Social norms, social rights, and employer policies all influence the extent to which women interrupt careers, reduce working time, or change jobs to achieve more flexibility or work-life balance. In most developed countries, rights to paid maternity leave have been vital in helping women maintain continuous careers and reducing gender inequalities.39 The United States is somewhat of an outlier as it has a high female full-time employment rate, even for mothers, despite very limited maternity leave—paid or unpaid. Research suggests this is because women are aware of U.S. employers’ hostility to both leave taking and reduced hours of work and they therefore maintain full-time work so as not to risk job and career loss.40 In countries with weaker social norms about the importance for everyone to work, such conditions would be associated with lower employment rates of mothers.

However, the current model of maternity leave is in danger because of the impact of new technologies. Traditional maternity leave only works as protection if there is still a job to return to at the end of the leave and the disruptive effects of new technologies make the survival of jobs or even firms more uncertain. Moreover, if more women work as self-employed, they may not be eligible for paid maternity leave. Even if the state were to extend paid maternity leave to the self-employed, women might still feel obliged to return to work very quickly to maintain their client base against potential competitors. If trends toward more fragmented employment arrangements cannot be reversed, equality policies may need to switch their emphasis from extending paid leave within a regular employment relationship to providing subsidized and plentiful childcare to support women’s careers, alongside measures to encourage fathers to participate in care.

Location of work

New technologies are expected to allow for more flexible work locations because of remote working on platforms or as high-skilled workers gain greater autonomy in the organization of their working lives. Working from home is expected to suit women more than men due to family and care commitments. However, in 2017 working from home in the EU28 did not vary much by gender. Somewhat more women than men usually work from home (5.3 percent of the employed persons compared to 4.7 percent) although slightly more men sometimes work from home (10.1 percent compared to 9.1 percent of women).41 These differences in sometimes working from home may be due to women’s greater involvement in in-person services and their underrepresentation in higher level jobs offering autonomy over work location.

Nevertheless, the spread of platform online work may enable some women to work who are only able to work from home. An International Labor Organization study found that although most crowdworkers in the United States worked also outside the home, 35 percent of the female respondents were working as crowd-workers because it was difficult for them to work outside the home, compared to 24 percent of the male respondents.42 Moreover, the same study found a gender pay gap even though the clients did not know the worker’s gender. Further investigation suggested that combining crowdwork with care work was the main cause. Difficulties experienced in switching between these spheres led to lower productivity and a tendency to opt for more routinized and lower-paid tasks. This explanation is compatible with other findings that women experience difficulties in distancing themselves from domestic tasks at home.43 The integration of home and work suits some people but others prefer work and home life to be kept separate, and women span both categories.44 Thus the benefits of co-location of work and home life cannot be generalized. Indeed, for flexibility in location to have beneficial impacts on gender equality, men will need to take on more responsibility for care when working from home, including organizing their work schedules around those commitments, just as women tend to do today.

Timing and regularity of work

New technologies have become associated with the 24/7 economy. Some regard the greater diversity of working hours as allowing individuals to work when it suits them and their family life. Others see it as preventing people from switching off from work, thereby increasing stress particularly for those with major non-work commitments. Claims that the flexibility of work in the gig economy is good for women do not necessarily take into account the added stress and unpaid work time—estimated to be 18 minutes for every hour of paid work—stemming from the need to constantly search and bid for additional work.45 More women are primarily reliant on this type of gig economy work than men for whom gig work is more often a secondary activity to a main job.46

Wage regulation

Women have tended to be less well protected than men from legal and collective regulation of wages. One significant development for gender equality in recent years has been the campaigns for living wages for all, for example in the United States and in the UK.47,48 This potentially higher floor to the labor market might be undermined if disruptive technologies lead to the growth of bogus self-employ- ment outside the scope of minimum wage regulation. Therefore, it matters a great deal for women and other vulnerable groups whether campaigns to ensure that minimum wage rules apply to workers in the gig economy are successful or not.49

Access to social protection

Women already have less access to social protection than men due to employment interruptions, shorter working time, lower earnings, and employment outside of the formal sector. Some of these gaps have narrowed as women have become more continuous workers, but the effects may be offset by increases in contributions required for a full pension.50 The degree of inequality by gender varies across countries, linked to whether women have rights to benefits as individuals or via their spouse and family and how the self-employed and unpaid caregivers are treated.51 However, to the extent that new technologies lead to more fragmented work or more self-employment, the scope for women to narrow these gaps in social protection may be limited.

It is due to these inequalities that many have advocated introducing a universal basic income (UBI) as a better solution to social protection to reduce discrimination against those who find themselves in insecure work and/or who mainly do unpaid care work. There is much to commend some aspects of a UBI in that it can reduce the risks of the new forms of work further exacerbating gender inequality. Entitlements to health insurance coverage, paid maternity leave, a citizen’s pension, and higher child benefits—all independent of work history—would provide for greater equality between households and genders by delinking protection from access to stable high wage jobs.52 What is less clearly in the interests of gender equality is establishing UBI aimed at making choices about entering the workforce more voluntary.53 Feminists have welcomed the UBI as a means of valuing unpaid care work and as providing a means by which society might begin to try to wrest back control over the economy from the market.54 However, the outcome, as Fraser has warned, may be a reversion to gender-unequal social and political systems.55 Until social norms change so that everyone is expected to be a caregiver as well as a breadwinner, the risks of such policies would be the withdrawal of female labor and a reinforcement of the gender division of labor.56 Fears that UBI might reinforce gender inequalities is given force in the dismissive comments by one of the chief promoters of UBI, Guy Standing, who argues that, “those crying for jobs should be told that pouring tea for a boss is no more productive or valuable than tending the daily needs of frail relatives.”57 That this comparison is between two almost exclusively female forms of work is not made explicit by the author but is clear to all readers of the text. Thus, there is much that can be done to improve women’s access to social protection without necessarily embracing a full UBI.58

Conclusion

Predicting the gender effects of the next phase of technological change is more complex than is often imagined. It requires an understanding of how technology may affect jobs (including how that process itself may be gendered) and an appreciation of the continuing revolution in gender relations. Changes in gender relations may rule out a return to domestic work in the face of job shortage and shape access to newly created jobs in ways that are not easily predictable. There are still reasons to be concerned about the impact of new technologies on gender equality. Some of the important props that have supported women’s careers, such as maternity leave, may come under threat with a trend toward less stable employment relationships and gig-economy working. Job shortage may intensify competition for jobs and thereby require those that secure a post to work longer hours, even if job shortages and rising productivity should prompt policy interventions to support job sharing and shorter working weeks.

It is clear that the predicted changes should be seized as an opportunity to rethink the organization of work and employment and to realign our institutions and structures to fit a more gender-equal society.59 These changes should not be used to reinforce current gender roles and stereotypes, as is the danger with UBI proposals and the promotion of the gig economy as good for women. Instead what is needed is a move toward more gender-equal sharing of wage work and unpaid care work, accommodated by an overdue trend toward shorter, not longer, full-time hours and more rights to combine care and work.

Jill Rubery is Professor of Comparative Employment Systems and the Director of the Work and Equalities Institute at Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and has worked extensively for the European Commission and for the International Labor Organization. Her research focuses on interdisciplinary, comparative analyses of employment systems. Her three recent books on European employment models include: G. Bosch, S. Lehndorff, and J. Rubery, eds., European Employment Models in Flux (Palgrave, 2009); D. Anxo, G. Bosch and J. Rubery, eds., The Welfare State and Life Transitions (Edward Elgar, 2010); and M. Karamessini and J. Rubery, eds., Women and Austerity: The Economic Crisis and the Future for Gender Equality (Routledge, 2013).