Women are more likely than men to bear the brunt of AI-driven job displacement, according to economists and labor researchers, a pattern that mirrors disruptions caused by automated telephone switches, household appliances, and personal computers over the past century.
"AI is focused on routine tasks and numbers and finding patterns, and those types of jobs are the clerical, administrative jobs that a lot of women hold," said Ariane Hegewisch, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Women's Policy Research. "It's still 90% of secretaries and clerical workers who are women."
A March report from the International Labour Organization found that nearly one in ten women in high-income countries works in occupations at the highest risk from AI — a figure that underscores how concentrated the exposure is along gender lines.
Economists and historians point to the automation of telephone switchboards as the closest historical parallel to the current AI investment wave. In the 1940s, nearly 95% of America's telephone operators were female, and the role required months of training to manage several hundred calls an hour at peak times.
When AT&T rolled out the automated telephone switch — described by researchers as one of the largest automation investments in history — an estimated 75,000 operator jobs eventually disappeared.
Economists James Feigenbaum of Boston University and Daniel P. Gross of Duke University's Fuqua School of Business tracked the impact using census and paycheck data, following local employment trends along the path of AT&T's investment. "The effect of this shock on incumbent operators was to dispossess many of their jobs and careers," they wrote in 2020, finding that many switchboard operators ended up in lower-paying positions or left the workforce entirely.
MIT economist David Autor says that outcome reflects a broader labor market reality. "Most people are not changing careers very often. They make their career decisions early, and they stick with those careers," he said. "If those careers, if the value of that work … suddenly goes out of fashion, becomes technologically obsolete, they're going to, in general, do something not as good."
Yet the same research found a more optimistic picture for workers who entered the labor market after the transition. "Future workers found work in other fields, often taking up similar-quality jobs," Feigenbaum and Gross wrote, adding that younger workers were "more adaptive to an evolving labor market." Their conclusion: "Anxiety over the opportunities available to future generations proved to be somewhat misplaced."
An earlier technological shift — the mass adoption of the washing machine — offers a different dimension of the same dynamic. A paper by University of Pennsylvania economist Jeremy Greenwood and co-authors dubbed household appliances "engines of liberation," arguing that by dramatically reducing the time women spent on unpaid domestic work, those devices freed up labor that could be redirected into the paid economy.
Between 1950 and 1980, the number of employed women in the United States grew by more than 25 million. The female labor force participation rate climbed to 52% from 34% over that same period, even as men's participation rate fell by 5 percentage points.
The central question for policymakers and economists today is whether AI will follow a similar arc — displacing workers in the short term while creating new categories of employment over a longer horizon, as rising productivity generates new demand for services and higher-wage work.
The answer may hinge on how quickly the labor market adapts and whether displaced workers — most of them women in administrative and clerical roles — receive retraining support before the structural shift takes hold. With AI investment accelerating across virtually every sector, the window for that adjustment is narrowing.
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