New tech is both a threat and a benefit for women’s access to work

Unlock the Editor’s Digest without cost

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favorite tales on this weekly e-newsletter.

As an unbiased adviser on personal fairness offers, Katherine Feeney has found out the way to liaise with shoppers from virtually wherever on the earth. She has made shows from places that embody a mountain hut in Canada and a surf camp in Indonesia.

Feeney began her one-woman consultancy — which helps personal fairness funds do the due diligence on their investments — two years in the past after leaving skilled providers agency Bain & Co. With a laptop computer and two moveable displays, she reckons she will be able to work from wherever that has WiFi.

This has been made potential, Feeney says, by advances in expertise in addition to by “the way in which the pandemic made distant work in skilled providers way more accepted”.

New expertise is reshaping the way in which all of us work, displacing jobs and altering the abilities employers search for. In some methods, ladies stand to lose out since they’re under-represented in rising fields similar to synthetic intelligence (AI). However ladies additionally stand to achieve from rising expertise.

Joseph Fuller, who co-leads Harvard Enterprise Faculty’s Managing the Way forward for Work analysis programme, says it is going to enable ladies to beat expertise gaps that cease them getting into many male-dominated professions, similar to development, warehouse operations, or monetary evaluation.

“In lots of settings, jobs which are rooted in expertise are supported by a workforce that skews male,” he says, which displays historic gender roles and biases in training. “New expertise ought to reduce the significance of getting a particular technical background.” An instance is generative AI, which may automate routine duties similar to writing code and analysing knowledge.

In the meantime, some female-dominated professions, similar to nursing and childcare, will probably be largely unaffected by technological shifts, as a lot of the work might be executed solely by a human, say analysts at LinkedIn Financial Graph (see chart).

Tendencies in hiring might additionally work in ladies’s favour. Inventive and analytical considering, for instance, are the com­petencies most firms say are rising in significance, in line with a World Financial Discussion board report, Way forward for Jobs (see chart). Fuller says that girls, who typically have “superior social expertise”, will disproportionately profit.

The worth of, say, problem-solving and communication expertise will probably be magnified by the rising emphasis that hiring managers are placing on these skills over slim instructional credentials, similar to a college diploma.

A skills-first strategy to hiring disproportionately helps under-represented teams, together with ladies, a LinkedIn report, referred to as Abilities First, has discovered. It says that, in male-dominated jobs, the pool of potential feminine hires would enhance eight-fold if firms employed for expertise not instructional credentials — 1 / 4 greater than for males (see chart).

World skilled providers agency Accenture is among the many organisations shifting in the direction of skills-based hiring in an try to fill new roles created by fast technological change.

Joan Moore, its UK head of early expertise, says elevating non-graduate recruitment general is one purpose it now “comfortably” achieves gender equality in entry-level hiring.

Rethinking hiring practices is necessary at a time when employers say they’re competing for employees with the suitable expertise. The worldwide deficit of expertise is forecast to rise to 11 per cent by 2030 from 3 per cent in 2020, warns organisational consulting agency Korn Ferry.

For girls with caring duties, Fuller predicts that expertise shortages will power firms to accommodate their wants: “Extra versatile, distant and part-time work will trigger improvements that enable ladies to not ‘have all of it’, however to ‘have extra’ by enabling productiveness from afar.”

A rising on-line gig economic system, the place platforms match freelancers with short-term contracts, is already serving to with flexibility. Round a 3rd of Feeney’s charges thus far this yr got here by means of Catalant, an internet platform for white-collar work — greater than final yr.

In 2021, greater than two in 5 gig economic system initiatives within the UK and US had been executed by ladies, notes the Oxford Web Institute, which research the results of digital expertise (see chart).

Employers, too, are discovering new methods to make use of expertise to draw expert employees. US monetary providers firm Prudential Monetary created an inside gig economic system platform to facilitate reskilling and has given groups autonomy over distant work. This helps with retention as a result of it “promotes a tradition of inclusion”, says Robert Gulliver, chief expertise and functionality officer. “Good expertise is difficult to search out and preserve.”

Fuller says leaders who prioritise variety and worker wellbeing, together with measures to assist preserve ladies within the workforce, will reap the rewards. “They perceive that in the event that they do it now, the payback unfolds over the subsequent few a long time,” he says.