If you actually read the article, it's not necessarily losing their jobs (emphasis mine). IMO it is irresponsible of the website to misrepresent the study so radically.
> The study, which focused on generative AI, determined that 9.6% of jobs held by females in high-income countries are poised for transformation, compared to 3.5% of those held by men. It added that most roles would likely be radically changed instead of eliminated
notahacker · 14h ago
The microcomputer and internet significantly changed a lot of "women's work" in the twentieth century too, much of it for the better as people who started out simply neatly writing down what the decision makers said ended up using newfangled tools called spreadsheets to manage complex tasks and gaining the responsibility of responding to certain types of communication in real time.
bonestamp2 · 14h ago
... and I'm going to speculate that a relatively simple explanation for this difference is that men hold more manual labor jobs than women and those jobs are going to be transformed less by AI than office jobs.
johncessna · 14h ago
> Don't be fooled by media bias & misinformation.
Don't be fooled indeed.
Nickersf · 14h ago
They need their clicks. lol
BJones12 · 14h ago
Misleading - the study did not find any job loss, it collected "perceive[d] potential of automation" and predicts job impact.
ajkjk · 13h ago
The sort of headline that people are going to love to reshare because it validates all their beliefs in one shot. And of course it does: it was designed to. Nevermind that reality is never as interesting as a scary headline.
reissbaker · 14h ago
This "study" is almost a parody of itself. Their methodology was they got humans to rate about 1.6k tasks, and then asked GPT-4 to rate the other 30k tasks; essentially their entire dataset is AI-generated (and using a pretty dumb model). Then they dressed it up in very fancy infographics and got the UN to publish it.
Some pretty bad examples:
* Accountants supposedly have significant risk of being replaced by AI, whereas advertising and PR managers have minimal risk. In reality, advertising has already been impacted by generative AI, whereas attempting to replace accountants with GPT-4 would generate significant legal risk.
* "Travel guides" are listed as minimal risk despite being fairly easy to generate, with plenty of AI-generated travel slop already existing. Meanwhile, "hotel receptionists" are listed as having significant risk of being replaced — do the study authors think that ChatGPT going to man the front desk, hand out keycards, and check people's IDs — sooner than just generating text and images of travel?
I wouldn't pay much attention to this study, other than as an example of how to not do a study on AI risk.
HideousKojima · 14h ago
Seems like the obvious reason is because women are disproportionately more likely to take "email jobs" than jobs that require hard skills, and email jobs are easier to replace with AI (mostly because they aren't really providing much real value and probably could have been safely eliminated even without AI). You even see this trend in fields that are harder, with women who become doctors far more likely to become pediatricians, general practice family doctors, etc. as opposed to oncologists or surgeons. Or women who go into software dev being far more likely to work on frontend as opposed to, say, writing netcode or plumbing the depths of database performance.
ajsnigrutin · 14h ago
> or plumbing
Or plumbing in general, like pipes and water, which AI (still?) cannot do.
zb3 · 14h ago
This would certainly require something beyond just software, like AI-powered humanoid robots, and I don't even know what's the current progress on that.. are we closer to that on the software or the hardware side?
cellis · 13h ago
I recently worked with a friend on an electrical rewiring job. There’s no way robots as they’re currently being developed have anywhere near the dexterity and vision + motor skills required to do electrical work in an average home built for humans up until probably 2030…and I don’t think they ever will. I’m willing to make a long bet on that. What I would bet on is new structures being built that are “robot ready” and that more and more of the housing stock is built like that, but given the pace of coding ( building code updates ) I don’t see that happening for another 20 years.
retskrad · 14h ago
Ask the average woman in the US, Europe and even Asia if they cared about any plight that men might go through, like losing their jobs in some fashion. Most would shrug and move on. Why are men expected to show so much empathy for women they don’t even personally know? These days, men and women compete for the same jobs, degrees, and apartments. So why should men keep putting women first?
jonplackett · 14h ago
So you are expecting anything that happens to women in general only to happen to women you don’t know?
> The study, which focused on generative AI, determined that 9.6% of jobs held by females in high-income countries are poised for transformation, compared to 3.5% of those held by men. It added that most roles would likely be radically changed instead of eliminated
Don't be fooled indeed.
Some pretty bad examples:
* Accountants supposedly have significant risk of being replaced by AI, whereas advertising and PR managers have minimal risk. In reality, advertising has already been impacted by generative AI, whereas attempting to replace accountants with GPT-4 would generate significant legal risk.
* "Travel guides" are listed as minimal risk despite being fairly easy to generate, with plenty of AI-generated travel slop already existing. Meanwhile, "hotel receptionists" are listed as having significant risk of being replaced — do the study authors think that ChatGPT going to man the front desk, hand out keycards, and check people's IDs — sooner than just generating text and images of travel?
I wouldn't pay much attention to this study, other than as an example of how to not do a study on AI risk.
Or plumbing in general, like pipes and water, which AI (still?) cannot do.