Millions of women’s jobs could be at jeopardy due to artificial intelligence if businesses eliminate back-office positions that were previously thought to be stable, secure occupations.
According to Brookings, the majority of the six million US professionals most at risk of AI-driven displacement are clerical and administrative professions, such as executive assistants, receptionists, and medical transcriptionists.
The think tank discovered that women make up more than 85% of those workers who are at risk.
The caution is issued at a time when gender disparities are already evident in the American labour market.
While nearly all net job gain over the previous year has come from the healthcare and social support sectors, where women outnumber men three to one, males are suffering from weakness in factory, transportation, and warehousing jobs.
As a result, the AI revolution may lead to a new and unsettling divide: women are in danger from the very technology that managers claim will increase office productivity, while males are being squeezed by the frailty of the old economy.
As large corporations wager on AI to handle more office work, recruiter Jennifer Maffei, who specialises in hiring administrative staff, told the Financial Times she has been inundated with letters from employees who have been “downsized, right sized, restructured.”
“It’s a mess,” she remarked.
AI is having an influence on men who work in manufacturing, transportation, and warehousing.
The CEO of OpenAI, the business that created ChatGPT, is Sam Altman.
According to Maffei, many of the employees who have contacted her have worked in reliable corporate support positions for years, only to discover that businesses now think AI can perform at least some of their tasks.
The worry is not that all clerks, receptionists, and assistants will vanish overnight.
The reason for this is that AI tools are being developed to perform many of the fundamental functions of these positions, including as meeting scheduling, document preparation, note-taking, form processing, and routine request handling.
As businesses invest heavily in AI, back-office employment have already suffered.
According to the FT, shipping behemoth Maersk has declared that it will eliminate 1,000 administrative positions worldwide, while corporate support employees have also been affected by larger cutbacks at firms like Procter & Gamble and Amazon.
Former Las Vegas executive assistant Kelly Norton told the FT that she once made six figures.
She claimed that many of the positions that are currently open offer about half what she used to make after months of looking for ten jobs every day.
She started an online forum with about 500 members to aid executive assistants in learning AI skills in an effort to stay ahead of the curve.
The majority of US workers affected by AI-driven displacement are administrative workers, such as executive assistants and receptionists.
She has even developed tools for supervisors, such as a bot that can extract requests, approvals, and urgent responses from messages.
She remarked, “It’s crazy what it can do.” However, that is also an issue.
The same tools that enable employees to work more quickly may also cause managers to question whether they actually need as many employees.
Job listings for administrative assistance positions have decreased by 5.4% from pre-Covid levels, according to Indeed statistics published by the FT.
According to a survey by the International Labour Organization, 9.6% of jobs for women in higher-income nations were at the most danger of “AI-driven task automation,” which is almost three times the percentage for men.
Men are confronting a quite different work constraint, which poses a danger to women’s office positions.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the American labour market is shifting away from men, with employment being lost in industries with a high concentration of men and the largest growth occurring in social assistance and healthcare.
According to Labour Department data quoted by the Journal, that industry created 656,500 positions in the year ending in April.
Tariffs and “poor performance” are having an impact on industries like manufacturing and transportation that are dominated by men.
The private sector would have lost 145,500 jobs in the absence of that growth.
After a brief post-pandemic comeback, manufacturing, where men outnumber women by more than two to one, has resumed its protracted fall.
Men outweigh women by about three to one in the transportation and warehousing industries, which has also been negatively impacted.
Harvard economist Lawrence Katz told the Journal that “men are clearly being affected by the tariffs and poor performance of manufacturing.”
According to Labour Department data quoted by the Journal, the number of payroll positions held by women has climbed by 421,000 since the end of 2024, while the number held by men has decreased by 1,000.
Among workers of prime age, the gap is particularly evident.
The employment-to-population ratio for women between the ages of 25 and 54 was 75 percent in April, higher than the 73.7 percent average for 2019. It was about where it was prior to the pandemic, at 86.5 percent for men of the same age.
For the time being, the employment market is simultaneously warning that industries with a high proportion of men, like manufacturing and transportation, are already losing ground and that, as AI becomes more prevalent in the workplace, office professions with a high proportion of women may follow.
