'Male jobs' will soon be replaced by robots - women are safe

Nearly half of today’s jobs will be taken over by robots in the next few decades and the majority are performed by men.

Jerry Kaplan, author of Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, believes that the automation of jobs “will not fall upon society evenly.”

Writing for The Atlantic, he says: “The jobs performed primarily by women are relatively safe, while those typically performed by men are at risk.”

This conclusion comes from analysis of the Oxford research paper The Future of Employment: How Susceptible are Jobs to Computerisation? This study shows that 47% of modern-day jobs are likely to be taken over by machines and male workers stand more than a 70% chance of being replaced.

This is because the jobs that are most likely to be automated involve driving or construction – which are dominated by men.

Kaplan writes: “Many of the jobs held by men involve perception and manipulation, often in conjunction with physical exertion, such as swinging a hammer or trimming trees.

“The latest mobile robots combine advanced sensory systems with dexterous manipulators to successfully perform these sorts of tasks.”

He continues to say that even more cerebral male-dominated professions – like commodity traders – are “being outdone by increasingly sophisticated machine-learning programs capable of quickly teasing subtle patterns out of large volumes of data.”

In contrast, jobs that require more emotional intelligence are safe – for now – and these roles are predominately held by females.

“Women typically work in more chaotic, unstructured environments, where the ability to read people’s emotions and intentions are critical to success,” says Kaplan.

“If your job involves distracting a patient while delivering an injection, guessing whether a crying baby wants a bottle or a diaper change, or expressing sympathy to calm an irate customer, you needn’t worry that a robot will take your job, at least for the foreseeable future.”