Women 3x More Likely to Lose Job to AI Than Men, UN Study Finds (opens in new tab)

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

Misleading - the study did not find any job loss, it collected "perceive[d] potential of automation" and predicts job impact.

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.

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.

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.

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?