ILO Study Finds Women Face High AI Exposure Risk

An International Labour Organization study published in March found nearly one in ten women in high-income countries works in an occupation at the highest risk of AI exposure.

By Career Ahead AI — AI-assisted, fact-verified against cited sources. Readers should verify key facts.

Women are concentrated in clerical work exposed to AI

Ariane Hegewisch said AI focuses on routine tasks, numbers and patterns, putting clerical and administrative work held by many women in view. Women make up ninety per cent of secretaries and clerical workers, she said. That concentration connects the exposure concern to work organized around the tasks she described.¹

Past automation shows how outcomes can differ

The history of telephone operators shows how technological change can reach an occupation dominated by women. In the US, women accounted for nearly ninety-five per cent of telephone operators in the 1940s. Automated telephone switching systems gradually reduced the need for operators, and an estimated seventy-five thousand operator jobs disappeared. The sequence links a technical change to a large loss of work.¹

The economists wrote that future workers found work in other fields, often taking up similar-quality jobs.

The outcomes were not identical for every generation. The economists wrote that future workers found work in other fields, often taking up similar-quality jobs. That account describes movement into comparable work among future workers; it does not say every incumbent operator found a similar role. The difference matters when comparing new employment with losses to workers already in an occupation.¹

Employment growth and automation produced mixed results

Employment growth provides another part of the historical record. From 1950 to 1980, the number of employed women in the US increased by more than twenty-five million. Over the same period, women's labour force participation rate rose from thirty-four per cent to fifty-two per cent. Together, the figures describe growth in both the number employed and participation.¹

Clerical work remained a large, heavily female occupation in 1980: nearly four point seven million Americans worked as secretaries, stenographers and typists, and more than ninety-eight per cent of them were women. The figures establish the scale and gender composition of those jobs. They do not by themselves quantify how many workers later lost work because of office software.¹

A 2022 paper by Marcus Dillender and Eliza Forsythe found that companies adopting software for office and administrative work experienced a one per cent decline in employment in the sector, alongside a three per cent increase in wages for college graduates. The findings show different changes in employment and pay at those companies, rather than a single outcome for all workers.¹

Check pathways beyond clerical work

For a role choice, treat clerical and secretarial work as a higher-exposure option to examine, not as an automatic dead end: nearly one in ten women in high-income countries works in an occupation at the highest risk of AI exposure, and women make up ninety per cent of secretaries and clerical workers. Before accepting a clerical-heavy post or a course aimed at that work, ask what other roles the qualification opens and whether the employer has pathways into them. Past experience shows future workers found work in other fields, often in similar-quality jobs, but that finding does not cover every incumbent.¹

Past experience shows future workers found work in other fields, often in similar-quality jobs, but that finding does not cover every incumbent.1

When comparing employers or negotiating pay, ask for evidence specific to the job: companies adopting software for office and administrative work experienced a one per cent decline in sector employment, while wages for college graduates at those companies rose three per cent. Those results do not establish what an individual worker earns, so use them as a prompt to ask whether the role is affected by software adoption and how pay differs by qualification. Do not assume the employment change and wage gain apply to every office worker.¹