02/14/2018

Automation May Have Disproportionate Impact on Women, Minorities

But economist predicts automation won’t lead to fewer jobs

Women are in the greatest danger of being replaced in the workforce by automation, unless they are retrained for other jobs, according to a recent report from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Black employees also are at risk of losing their jobs to robots, Katrinell Davis, a professor in Florida State University's Program in African American Studies, said in an interview.

But Heidi Shierholz, senior economist and director of policy for the Economic Policy Institute, said, "There is no basis for believing that robots or automation are having an unusual transformative effect on the labor market."

Davos Report
Of the 1.4 million jobs in the United States that the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects will disappear by 2026 because of automation, 57 percent belong to women, noted the Jan. 22 report. For example, women dominate administrative assistant positions and the report stated that 164,000 women in those jobs may be out of work within the next eight years. But with retraining, women in these roles can transition into other positions, the report observed.

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