Jobs of the future and the importance of closing the gender gap

Terms such as digitalization, big data and artificial intelligence have gained strength in popular discourse, tinged with fear and optimism due to their growing impact on our lives and, in particular, on the transformation of employment.

Dr. Vania Figueroa Ipinza / Director of the InES-Gender project at the Autonomous University of Chile

UNESCO estimates that by 2050, 75% of jobs will require skills related to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), despite this, we face a shortage of trained people to meet this demand. Finding people to fill these positions would be much easier if women didn’t shy away from STEM fields, due to persistent negative stereotypes that wrongly label these fields as masculine.

The latest report on the gender gap by the World Economic Forum (WEF) once again raises alarms regarding the underrepresentation of women in these areas, highlighting that fewer women graduate in Information and Communication Technologies and Engineering and Manufacturing, critical areas for post-Covid-19 economic reconstruction, even more so considering that the pandemic meant a 10-year setback in women’s labor participation.

Accumulating evidence shows that achieving parity in STEM will not only reduce the skills gap, occupational segregation and feminized poverty, it will also contribute to economic growth, productivity and GDP growth, more than enough reasons to promote policy investment policies that make it possible to close the gender gap.

Despite the fact that in our country women outnumber men in enrollment in higher education, only 1 in 4 corresponds to a STEM career. So who will work in the jobs of the future? Even though advancing technology will lead to long-term job growth, a common fear is job losses from automation. If the worst nightmare is that a robot ends up doing our job, imagine a racist and sexist one doing it!

The consequences of the lack of participation of women and work teams that are not very diverse go beyond the mere impact on employment. For example, the development of artificial intelligence uses data created by people as a starting point for the design of the algorithms or set of instructions to execute a certain function, so it can reproduce human failures such as bias based on age, gender or race. Let us now transfer those flaws to their applications in areas such as health, recruitment or urban design, the algorithmic gender bias will continue to perpetuate the unequal world in which we live.

The path to transform this reality and move towards a sustainable, resilient and equitable society requires redoubling efforts to increase the interest and participation of girls and women in STEM.