Women’s employment, segregation and skills in the future of work

ABSTRACT

Discussion of the future of work has focused a lot on the type or number of jobs that new technology will create or destroy. Little consideration has been given to how gender fits into that. This article examines this by considering: (a) the automatability of male and female jobs; (b) employment projections for male and female jobs; (c) past and projected sex segregation of employment; and (d) past and projected skill levels of male and female jobs. Our analysis makes use of historical data and projections for the Australian and US labour markets. It appears that neither technological change nor other structural changes in labour markets are likely to especially disadvantage women. If anything, women’s jobs are slightly more secure (or less insecure) than men’s; there has been, and will be, an improvement in the skill levels of jobs held by women; and there has been a small reduction in average sex segregation. However, developments within specific industries are important and difficult to predict. In that respect, the information and communications technology (ICT) occupations go against the trend elsewhere, having experienced transformation in their gender composition that is reinforcing, rather than weakening, gender segmentation.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender and work
• employment projections
• information and communication technology
• gender segregation
• skill

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Peetz

David Peetz is Professor of Employment Relations at Griffith University, in the Centre for Work, Organisation and Wellbeing, a co-researcher at the Inter-university Centre for Research on Globalisation and Work in Montreal, and a member of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. At time of publication he was a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the City University of New York.  He previously worked in the then Commonwealth Department of Industrial Relations, spending over five years in its Senior Executive Service. He has been a consultant for the International Labour Organisation in Thailand, Malaysia, Geneva and China, and undertaken work for unions, employers and governments of both political persuasions in Australia and overseas. He has several books including Unions in a Contrary World (Cambridge University Press, 1998), Brave New Workplace (Allen & Unwin, 2006), Women of the Coal Rushes (UNSW Press, 2010) and Varieties of Gender Gaps (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), as well as numerous academic articles, papers and reports. 

Georgina Murray

Georgina Murray is Adjunct Associate Professor at Griffith University, Australia, a collaborator at the Inter-university Centre for Research on Globalisation and Work in Montreal, Canada, and the author of many articles and papers, as well as co-editor of two 2017 books:  Women at Work: Labor Segmentation and Regulation. (with David Peetz) and Think Tanks - key spaces within global structures of power, (Alejandra Salas-Porras).  She is sole author of Capitalist Networks and Social Class in Australia and New Zealand (Ashgate, 2006), has co-authored Women of the Coal Rushes (UNSW Press, 2010) and co-edited Financial Elites and Transnational Business: Who Rules the World? (Edward Elgar, 2012).  Her current projects include a book project with Marco Öchsner, Capitalism ate my body.