The World Economic Forum at Davos is a font of news—and one hot topic is the supplanting of jobs by tech and AI. That news is not good for the people who depend on those jobs, particularly since there’s no pipeline of new jobs coming to take their place.

The Huffington Post reports that one Davos panel titled “Putting jobs out of work” refers to a McKinsey estimate that over the next 10 or so years, a third of all workers in Germany and the U.S. may need to find work in new occupations.

The rise of automation and its supplanting of jobs done by people was highlighted this week by Amazon’s rollout of its first cashierless store. And while opinion is divided about just how many jobs will disappear, and at which skill levels, the end result is that a lot of jobs are going to vanish—and they won’t be coming back. Jobs most threatened by tech that were discussed at the panel included cashiers, of course, thanks to Amazon, and truck drivers with the eventual adoption of driverless trucks.

“I think we’re facing a crisis we aren’t talking about,” Arlie Hochschild, professor of sociology at Cal Berkeley, is quoted saying. But what’s also not being talked about is how the great job vanishing act will affect women, who stand to lose a disproportionate number of jobs.

Another Huffington Post report says that nearly 60 percent of the jobs at risk of replacement by technology are held by women. The “Towards a Reskilling Revolution” report released at Davos analyzed nearly 1,000 jobs across the U.S. economy, and its conclusions, says HuffPo, “are bleak.”

The numbers are truly scary: an expected 1.4 million U.S. jobs will be at risk from technology and other factors between now and 2026. And 56 percent of those jobs are held by women—who already deal with an increasing gender gap and facing a 217-year wait to have the same job and wage opportunities as men.

It’s not just male-dominated factory jobs at risk, according to Saadia Zahidi, head of education, gender and work at WEF, who says in the report that “[t]he narrative tends to focus on male, blue-collar factory workers, for example. But there are also a number of very female-dominated roles like secretaries and administrative assistants that are facing displacement”—almost 164,000 female secretaries are at risk, the report says, compared with 90,000 at-risk male assembly line workers.

Then there’s retail, with salespeople and cashiers—nearly 74 percent of the latter female—the top two most common jobs. Together they account for some 7.8 million workers.

Instant Insights /

Automation is going to take jobs, especially for women

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