This Wired article, despite its offensive title (MEN WILL LOSE THE MOST JOBS TO ROBOTS, AND THAT’S OK), makes some interesting points that the kinds of jobs being automated today might disproportionately affect men.
Robots are coming for our jobs—but not all of our jobs. They’re coming, in ever increasing numbers, for a certain kind of work. For farm and factory labor. For construction. For haulage. In other words, blue-collar jobs traditionally done by men…
Some political rhetoric blames outsourcing and immigration for the decline in “men’s work,” but automation is a greater threat to these kinds of jobs—and technological progress cannot be stopped at any border. A recent Oxford study predicted that 70 percent of US construction jobs will disappear in the coming decades; 97 percent of those jobs are held by men, and so are 95 percent of the 3.5 million transport and trucking jobs that robots are presently eyeing. That’s scary, and it’s one reason so many men are expressing their anger and anxiety at home, in the streets, and at the polls.
While all of this is going on, though, there’s a counterphenomenon playing out. As society panics about bricklaying worker droids and self-driving 18-wheelers, jobs traditionally performed by women—in the so-called pink-collar industries, as well as unpaid labor—are still relatively safe, and some are even on the rise. These include childcare. And service. And nursing, which the US Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts will need a million-plus more workers in the next decade.
Because when I walk by Bubba the construction worker with his cat calling and cigar smoking I think, that’s the guy I want to leave alone in my home with my children. Of course, that’s as stereotype, but I pass a few Bubbas on the way to my job every day, where I pound on a keyboard alongside men and women. I’m willing to buy the idea that manly jobs are filled mostly by men, but I’m not willing to buy the idea that most men work at manly jobs. I don’t have the stats, but I willing to speculate there are a lot of us men pounding on keyboards for every manly lumberjack and cowboy out there. I wouldn’t discourage my son from considering a career in nursing or elementary school teaching, if that interests him, but more likely I will gently steer both my son and daughter toward technical fields like computer science, genetics, or engineering where they can be the ones designing and directing the technologies that is changing all our lives. I would like them to have a solid foundation of a well-rounded education in language, history, and ethics, which everyone needs, and then some solid skills with real economic value to top that off.