There’s nothing about a person’s gender, race, or age that makes them more or less vulnerable to job disruption from digital transformation.
Faethm spoke to Fortune magazine about the accelerated uptake of new technologies by the COVID-19 pandemic's hardest hit industries, driven by the need to adapt to new ways of working and gain cost efficiencies. As a result, workers in roles that can be easily automated are at increased risk of job loss.
Read the Fortune interview, 'Whose bodies do we see?' >
Some jobs are inherently more automatable than others, due to their high number of repetitive, manual and generally lower-skilled tasks. In our latest research on the impacts of AI and robotic technology on the US workforce, we found that these automation-prone roles are filled primarily by women, as well as by members of Black and Hispanic communities. These groups have already been disproportionately impacted by joblessness as a result of the global pandemic.
Vulnerability to job disruption is a direct result of the types of industries that these groups work in, the roles they fill, and often the job opportunities that are available to them because of geographic or structural limitations.
So how might organizations ensure that digital transformation doesn’t exacerbate existing workforce inequalities?