Job losses due to AI could hit women even harder. The telephone operator will explain why.

Decades before Siri, Alexa, and ChatGPT, there were real people, almost always women, at the center of the information world. She was so important that most long-distance communications would not be possible without her.

She was a telephone operator, once some of the largest jobs for American-born white women under the age of 20.

Now that job doesn’t exist.

The world is struggling to understand what the dawn of artificial intelligence will mean for society, culture, and the economy. Many ordinary Americans are just wondering what it means for their jobs.

The history of technological progress, from the automatic telephone exchange to the washing machine and the advent of personal computers, can provide some guidance. And that guidance suggests that women are likely to be most affected by AI.

“AI is focused on routine tasks, numbers, finding patterns, and those are the administrative, administrative jobs that many women hold. Ninety percent of secretaries and clerks are still women,” said Ariane Hegewisch, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

New research supports this. In March, the International Labor Organization concluded that nearly one in 10 women in high-income countries work in jobs that are most at risk from AI.

In the 1940s, nearly 95 percent of American telephone operators were women. This was a relatively well-paying job for women at the time, but it was a complicated job. It took months of training to be able to handle hundreds of calls per hour during peak hours. Operators were expected to be prompt, accurate, and courteous.

When AT&T introduced automatic telephone exchanges, these women were hit hard. This is one of the largest automation investments in history, much like the massive AI investments underway today, and created one of the biggest technological shocks this country has ever seen.

In the decades since automatic switches became popular, an estimated 75,000 operator jobs have been eliminated.

Economists James Feigenbaum of Boston University and Daniel P. Gross of Duke University’s Fuqua School studied census and payroll data from the time to track local employment trends as AT&T invested in switches across the country.

“The impact of this shock on incumbent operators was to cost them many of their jobs and careers,” they wrote in 2020. It turns out that many switchboard operators end up taking lower-paying jobs or quitting the workforce altogether.

Economist David Autor said the results reflected the reality that many workers were already in the highest-paying jobs. When you run out of work, your next steps are often interrupted.

“Most people don’t change careers very often. They decide on a career early on and stick to that career,” he said. “If those carriers, the value of their work…suddenly becomes obsolete and technologically obsolete, they’re generally going to do less good.”

But Feigenbaum and Gross also found that the next generation of women is doing better.

“Prospective workers found work in other fields, often in jobs of similar quality,” the researchers wrote, and younger workers were “better adapted to the evolving labor market… Fears about the opportunities available to future generations turned out to be somewhat misplaced.”

In other words, one type of job disappeared, but over time another equally good job appeared.

By the 1950s, another technological innovation emerged that had a major impact on women. It’s a washing machine.

Washing machines and other home appliances, dubbed “engines of liberation” by University of Pennsylvania economist Jeremy Greenwood and others in a seminal paper on the subject, have dramatically reduced the amount of time women spend on unpaid household chores. This meant that although women’s responsibilities for the home remained, their time could be reallocated to paychecks outside the home.

From 1950 to 1980, the number of employed women in the United States increased by more than 25 million as gender norms changed. Their participation rate, or the share of the female population in the workforce, increased from 34% to 52%. At the same time, more than 16 million men found work, but male participation fell by 5 percentage points.

Questions related to today’s AI boom: How did the economy suddenly find jobs for these women? If AI creates a vast new pool of available workers, will the economy be able to put them to work?

First, women’s entry into the workforce meant that the demand for jobs that were once performed in the home shifted to the paid economy, such as childcare and meal preparation. Second, as countries became richer, other employment opportunities for women emerged in areas of the service economy, such as retail, restaurants, leisure, hospitality, and even some professional services. And third, as American businesses grew, they needed more people to handle everything from payroll to customer accounts.

Changes in the economy and business were partly related to the entry of women into the workforce, but there was also some luck by chance: the United States was experiencing a boom and businesses were changing to require more employees.

“From 1940 to 1980, a large amount of new jobs were created in the U.S. economy, and they were office and clerical jobs that were accessible to people with a high school education,” Auter said.

The next big revolution to impact women in the workplace was the personal computer.

Before the advent of PCs, women were the backbone of office infrastructure. According to the 1980 U.S. Census, approximately 4.7 million Americans worked as secretaries, stenographers, and typists. More than 98% were women.

When IBM introduced the personal computer in 1981 and Microsoft Word arrived just two years later, some intermediaries (in this case, intermediaries) became obsolete. It’s not that writing, filing, and editing are no longer necessary. We simply moved most of these tasks from our full-time administrative staff to other staff within the office. Executives can now type their own reports, book their own travel, and print their own documents.

But for working women, PCs weren’t bad news at all. Research shows that even at the dawn of the PC era, women were more likely than men to use computers at work. PCs made new tools such as spreadsheets, databases, and general computing power readily available. As many roles become obsolete, many women have adapted and found new ways to leverage emerging technologies to become indispensable to their employers.

That is the potential outcome of AI. In some cases, tasks are removed rather than entire jobs, freeing up workers’ time and ability to do the remaining value-added work that only humans can do.

A 2022 paper by Marcus Dillender and Eliza Forsythe found that when companies introduced software to perform administrative and administrative tasks, employment in those areas fell by 1%, but wages for college graduates increased by 3%.

Far more women are earning college and advanced degrees and holding executive positions than when other technologies penetrated the economy and offered some potential protection from automation. But it may not last long. One of the promises of AI is to move jobs performed by humans up the value chain.

Whatever capabilities new technologies currently have, their prospects are uncertain. Because, says Hegewisch, rather ominously, “AI can learn.”