Women working in tech and financial services are at greater risk of losing their jobs to increased use of AI and automation than their male peers, according to a report that found experienced females were also being sidelined as a result of “rigid hiring processes”.
It means the wimmins are doing the more boring, routiune and thus mechanisable jobs in tech and financial services, no?
I have spent most of my career in businesses which had plenty of women at all levels, however more recently I have been working in an organisation dominated by women. My boss, a regional CEO, is a chap but the global CEO is female, as is 70% of the staff.
An endless fascination with process and busywork. An inability to make decisions. Epic levels of passive aggression. The experience has brought me discover new depths of misogyny I didn’t know I had.
“An endless fascination with process and busywork.”
Women are really good at being bureaucrats, at doing as they are told. It’s why girls do so well at school, because it’s mostly a bureaucracy. And the world looks on this as a problem. “why aren’t boys doing so well?”. Well, it’s because boys are rebellious, and in a positive way. They don’t sweat their guts out wasting their time on history they’ve been told to do. They’re spending time on things that particularly interest them. Girls are going off to do bollocks at university, boys are doing some Udemy courses that cost a few hundred quid.
If you work in a large office, women don’t improve the processes. Give a woman a sheet of paper with numbers to enter, they’ll just type it in. Give it to a man, and after a short time he’ll ask “why are we doing this?” or “do you just have this as a file that I could cut and paste?”. Offices often have custom-built Excel VBA functions to do certain things, and they were always done by a man. Often someone with no programming experience but he just figured it out. They generally work. Sometimes need a little polish, but do the job.
It’s the same with lots of industries. Women will try and follow bureaucratic paths. Like they leave school, go to film school, then write lots of letters to get jobs. They start as runners, fetching coffee because it’s AT A BIG STUDIO and they’ve been told you work your way up. What boys do is start making films with what they can get their hands on at age 13 and by the time they’re 30, they’ve made Jaws, The Terminator, or Reservoir Dogs. They didn’t waste money and time sitting in film classes doing political bollocks. They watched movies and made movies.
There are women who aren’t like this, but they’re at the male end of the spectrum. There’s certain things that you can also observe about them. Like they don’t care that much about dressing for work, or having children. You can see this with many great historical women. Grace Hopper never had children. Mrs Thatch let the nanny raise hers.
“Mrs Thatch let the nanny raise her [children]”
Hmm, look how that turned out.
Huge improvements to the economy, and some Argentine ships sunk. Worked out great.
I think the BiSD was pointing to how the children turned out – especially the son….
Joke
Whoosh
Your head
Evidently!!
In my long IT career, I found it easier to teach IT skills to someone who understood the job that to teach the job to those with IT skills.
when they say “rigid hiring processes” they mean wanting people that have skills relevant to the job. They are very explicit about this:
“To reverse the trend, the corporation is calling on employers to focus on re-skilling female workers not currently in technical roles, particularly those in clerical positions most at risk of being displaced by automation.” and “Upskilling staff would allow employers to focus on candidates’ potential rather than their past technical experience”
You have to live in a strange place if you believe that you can re-skill “clerical positions” to “technical roles” or that those people in those positions are interested in going into those kind of roles. It sounds better for everyone if those women do what they are already doing and “leave their roles […] for reasons including lack of advancement, lack of recognition and inadequate pay.”
I was once in a job where I was snowed under with managing a team (never again, I swear). Work decided to hire for me effectively a personal assistant to manage meeting minutes, document control, and the like. Our HR manager, wait, it gets better, had a friend who had been raising her kids for ten years and was looking for a part time job.
I was impressed with her at the interview and agreed to a trial. I didn’t have a lot of hope it would work.
Within four weeks she was checking electrical drawings. We were turning out a shed load at the time, including markups, for the CAD department, and it turned out she was a genius at quickly and accurately checking whether the requested changes had been done properly. Made my and my chief electrical designer’s jobs much easier. He helped her with any problematic ones, I had a quick glance then signed them.
Obviously she had no idea what she was looking at, but I would have trusted her over AI to do the same job.
Rigid hiring processes nowadays often mean ”no experience necessary, no White males”.
You have to live in a strange place if you believe that employers think it’s their job to upskill staff. The applicant is supposed to do that themselves, get that 20 years expereince in Rust for that entry-level office admin job.
Those “rigid hiring processes” will have been written by the (overwhelmingly female) HR department.
I suspect a robot hoover could do the job of Relationship Manager or similar.
Whilst I agree 100%. My observation is that the job of Relationship Manager at a supplier is to make the Relationship managers at the client firm appear busy and vice versa.
On a big contract it’s not uncommon for the cost of the suppliers dedicated Relationship Manager to be included as a contractual line item paid by the client. This is very popular with both the Relationship Managers as it gives them both fantastic job security.
But the overwhelming number of middle-management women will presumably have a considerable impact on the AI points of reference.
Bigger fuckups with even less accountability. AI with attitude.
Women working in tech and financial services are at greater risk of losing their jobs to increased use of AI and automation than their male peers, according to a report that found experienced females were also being sidelined as a result of “rigid hiring processes”.
Gven AI has been around for a matter of months what is the source of this data? When redundancies are in the offing,male candidates are always at greater risk of being retired or made redundant. Very few men succeed in discrimination claims at employment tribunals. Those that do invariably are ‘non-caucasian’ – so the story is a propaganda piece. Understandable as feminism has complete control of the mainstream media and almost every large and medium size firm in the country. It also has total control of politics, the judiciary and academia.
To reverse the trend, the corporation is calling on employers to focus on re-skilling female workers not currently in technical roles, particularly those in clerical positions most at risk of being displaced by automation.
As another great contributor, Emil , makes the point – what planet do you have to be on to make the assumption that someone with good clerical skills would either have the skills or the inclination to pursue a technical role. Many developers I have worked with absolutely despise clerical tasks with a visceral passion – so the notion – almost Murphyesque that people are fungible parts that can be ‘slotted in’ like some kind of prefabricated structure. Just garbage – much like a lot of AI output in fact.
It is estimated that about 119,000 clerical roles in tech and the financial and professional service sectors, predominantly carried out by women, will be displaced by automation over the next decade. Reskilling those affected by these job losses could save companies from making redundancy payments totalling as much as £757m, the report found.
But a whole raft of roles in these sectors shouldn’t exist – anything related to Diversity for example can be got shot of with no impact to anyone other than the jobholder. Ditto for LGBT Alphabet soup. So there’s a lot of deadwood that could be got rid of. As with any change, there will be winners and losers. While it’s amusing to have an AI mockup of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T 800 wiping out the current government,the worst in human history – I think the fears of carnage are at the moment overblown. The likes of the WEF and other organizations committed to the Great Reset and Great Replacement are far greater threats, as are militant Islamists (who will actively discriminate against women!!!)
It’s not just diversity and all that. It’s that once a company gets super-duper profitable, the principle-agent problem goes into overdrive. I’ve worked places where people were building their own programming language, people were going off to tech conferences in Barcelona.
In one large bank I worked in, 4 people were absolutely critical. The people who knew how to fix and maintain the branch system. FOUR. Out of 10,000. If they’d gone to the pub together and died in a car crash, they’d have been in deep shit. Were they paid like that? Were they protected like that? No. And there were hundreds of “project co-ordinators” in that organisation, women of a certain age, and if 100 of them had died in a train crash, you wouldn’t have noticed.
Like Elon binned 80% of the staff at Twitter, and it still works. If you saw some of the things the techies were doing there, they were just hobbies. Someone had talked the boss into letting them build their own app framework. Is that the job of a social media company? Does it add value to them? No.
I agree Western Bloke. There’s usually half a dozen people tops that are critical. Twenty years ago I got asked over a smoke after a meeting telling us how we were going to finish the project in two months “You’ve done this before, how long really?” Bear in mind he was from our head contractor, but smoker’s honour applies. And he was a civil engineer who really wanted to know because most of the remaining work was electrical/electronic.
I thought about it and said “95% will get done in a few months. Then a few more months for the good fault finders to run their arses off sorting out the recalcitrant issues. Call it six months”.
I was out by a week.
There are a lot of people who at best do almost nothing and at worse soak up multiple other peoples effort with no tangible gain.
It would be nice to fire them but that can be impossibly hard and time consuming to do in some places. It also generates a lot of negative press so it’s often better to dress it up as a sad but inevitable redundancy. This means that it’s the jobs that are going rather than the useless people in those positions being singled out.
AI is the wonderful excuse for a big round of redundancies. It also has the potential side benefit that it might actually work and replace the output of any folks who had been hiding the fact they were occasionally useful.
“Women working in tech and financial services are at greater risk of losing their jobs to increased use of AI and automation than their male peers”
Lol. Maybe fish do need bicycles after all.
This is what I’ve been predicting. A great deal if not most of desk jockeying is distributed, rules based data processing. Which is pretty well made for AI. So the simpler tasks are going to go first. And the great benefit to employers is most of the actual work is cross communication between the processing nodes, coordinating the processing. All those memos & meetings.
So if you’re a desk jockey, you really need to be looking at your job with an eye to the future. If your skillset consists of a set of rules & how to apply them, think back to how you learnt to do it. Be honest with yourself. How hard was that?
It doesn’t work that great with AI, as it’s a bit fuzzy. But there’s already tools like ServiceNow, Jira that do a lot of rules-based automation.
I’ve worked in software teams of 3 or 4 and we’re all developing software. One of these is the manager and spends about half a day a week on managing, progress reporting etc. Everything goes through Jira. I’m stuck? I add a note, send to the manager and we work out where to go. It’s done, click that, assigns and notifies the manager. Then he can click a button and Jira produces a weekly progress report. Add a few notes and up it goes. We don’t bother much with meetings. If something needs to be shared around, email it.
ServiceNow? If you need your air conditioner serviced, you go onto a company website, put in some details and there’s a rules engine that figures out who is going to do it and automatically assigns the job to a bloke to come do it. And you just set up the rules once. It might even have a workflow, like the bloke finds a bigger problem, so has to escalate it.
But some places? You still have someone who is a “project co-ordinator” who emails you, asking what you’re working on. And they put it together into a report. I could replace them with Jira for £200/month. And you sit in meetings that take an hour a day as everyone talks about what they’re working on. So I’m needed for 5 minutes out of an hour. If I’m working on a bit of software to do with garden waste at the council, I don’t need to know about how the software is going for the social services system.
If I were you, I’d be worried whether my rules based software development was AI replaceable.
It might be. But you should understand a lot of AI talk is people flogging investments and people looking for something to write about.
Like these robotaxis have people watching them and sometimes intervening. Like Google AI Studio will write code for me but sometimes I have to manually tweak it. I rather like the tool.
Thing to bear in mind with AI* is that it really doesn’t have to be perfect. It just needs a lower failure rate than human. And AI will improve. How do you improve humans?
World ends tomorrow, women & minorities hardest hit.
It means they’re writing a lot of “business emails”. Which can be automated quite easily.
Rather like commercial art, where the prime requirement is that it goes with the company colors.
I worked in a former Poly, and had acquaintances all over the place as a result of several decades of interaction. One was a rather masculine, probably lesbian, lady in what I would have described as a non-job, and whose politics I would have guessed at being Lefty McLeft-face. One day at the coffee shop I bumped into her with her immediate colleagues from a pointless department of institutional fuckwittery. The conversation that I joined was about recent senior staff appointments. I nearly fell off my chair when she said “All organisations headed by a woman turn into a hell on earth”. I’ve never forgotten her saying it, nor how true it was and continues to be.
AIUI, 95% of the jobs done more efficiently by AI will be those currently performed by the working from home lanyard class.
Unfortunately absent a proper gotterdamerung of UK public sector, the lanyard classes with the nomenklatura pension schemes will not be made irrelevant.
A pity,
I would not be too disappointed at a world where queries and requests for assistance directed to HMRC, local government, banks and utilities were dealt with, at least initially, by AI.
The current chatbots may be 95% useless but the gap between them and “Michael” in Mumbai will narrow quickly.
Yup, that’s the problem.
BiS is probably right, AI is going to make most of these jobs unnecessary.
Unfortunately the people whose jobs are being made pointless are the ones in control of the hiring and firing, so I don’t expect we’ll get rid of them, or their costs, any time soon.
Let’s face it, most of them are unnecessary already, because what they’re doing doesn’t need doing. But they’re still collecting a salary and pension entitlements, and making the rest of us irritated and less productive because we’ve got to deal with all their crap.
My guess is that the big companies are mostly too much controlled by the lanyard-wearers to get rid of them. So it needs new companies to start up without all these barnacles, but that means we won’t see the benefits of AI until those new companies have destroyed the old ones.
And in the public sector, that might never happen.
We could end up with all the benefits of AI being taken, through taxation, to pay for the public sector lanyard-wearers.
Seen elsewhere today: “at the speed of relevance”, talking about getting a new cruise missile from contract award to live test within 2 years. Uttered by a Brigadier General, of course.
I predict this phrase will supplant “at pace” among the (newly redundant) lanyard classes within months.
One hopes that any AI doing one of these jobs will be programmed to wonder ‘Why am I doing this job, is it relevant to the business at all.’ Once upon a time as part of my job I had to generate and distribute a quite technical report. I suspected that it was of no use or informational content to anyone. Eventually I decided not to bother. Never heard another thing about it.
Which brings me to the point. First, any AI ought to be able to do the same, if not in such a passive-aggressive fashion. Second, the best place for an AI would be analysing how these flows work and how much could be cut or streamlined. That is a task which does not get done properly by human management with human self-interest.
As a junior officer, I often got demands for reports on some such items. I always ignored the first request, more than half the time, no one ever followed up with a second request. Usually it was a junior officer trying to pad their fitness report. How did I know? I spent six years enlisted before getting my commission .
Is that human management likely to want the AI to do this, or look kindly on the nerd having a laugh who decides to set the AI at it for the lols? We’re in turkeys voting for Xmas territory here. Everyone loves a sinecure.
The problem with that approach Rhoda (Well it’s not a problem as such) but in the entire Public sector in the UK you could be talking 5 to 6 million people – a high percentage of their work is useless. Anything related to Net Zero, DEI and LGBT Alphabet Soup/ Big Trans is by definition useless. and that’s just a starter for ten. However, the likelihood of such people voting for self – immolation is zero….
Companies have tried to deal with worker shortages by increasing wages above the national average, but the report found that higher pay rates would not solve the problem.
The report found that supply and demand doesn’t apply to jobs. Nobel Prize when?
It warned that the widening digital talent gap was forecast to last until at least 2035 and that under this scenario the UK could miss out on more than £10bn of economic growth.
It’s not worth increasing wages as nobody cares about how much they earn apparently, but we’ll also “miss out” on “£10Bn of economic growth”.
Not sure why we’d care though, as we’ve already established money isn’t an important human incentive.
So that report was a waste of time, eh?
Companies have tried to deal with worker shortages by increasing wages
Not that I’ve seen.
the widening digital talent gap was forecast to last
There’s no digital talent gap, there’s an employers-prepared-to-get-off-their-arse-and-employ-people gap. If you’re applying for 1500 jobs a year* and getting nowhere the failing isn’t on the applicant end. The failing is employers demanding 100% applicants and refusing to take any of the thousands of 95%s applying and making do with what is available, instead they stamp their foot and scream for the impossible.
*Yes, that many, otherwise you get booted off the Dole and starve.
jgh, you might want to consider that the putative employer needs the job done for the value it will create, so to leave it open and that value uncreated costs more than employing someone to do it, so they have, and you lost out to them.
Not that I’ve seen.
Yarp I thought it was funny they’re telling employers what they want to hear. Britain PLC dreams of being able to pay nothing for labour and somehow still make profits. In practice, we usually pay peanuts and then complain about the monkeys.
In every job interview I’ve ever had, they’ve always asked what motivates me, and the answer is always the same:
Money, lucre, loot, spondulicks, cash, pictures of Her Majesty.
It’s the answer I want to hear when interviewing, but you’d be surprised how many young people these days lack greed, or don’t want to admit to greed (why?). Shocking, actually. Greed is good.
You mean you don’t tell them you just want to bring your “whole self” to work?
In my experience too many are unwilling to commit their whole selves during working hours.
The disinterested element, both physical and mental, that actually shows up rarely gets the job done.
God, no. I’ve always told people not to do that, just bring their professional self who hits their targets with no excuses.
People are shy about asking for money in job interviews because they don’t understand what kind of conversation they’re having. You can have the kiddie table conversation where you pretend to enjoy being “challenged” or some such nonsense, and wait to see if they offered you or one of the other drones the job at the advertised (shit) salary.
Or you can have the big boy conversation about how you’re obviously the right choice and how much they’ll have to offer to secure your handshake on a deal. People are afraid of being told “no”, so most have the fake conversation. Frustrates the hell out of me, because I’m sitting there thinking “ask me… ask me… ask me”. Nobody likes doing interviews and that’s another thing candidates need to remember – the people across the table want to fill the vacancy and get on with their lives. Make their job easier.
Nobody wants me to bring my whole self to work, do they Mr Flibble?
If I ever “brought my whole self to work”, I’d be up in front of HR by lunchtime.
I suspect Steve (and most of us here) is the same.
ROFL
AI is no more *usefully* intelligent than the guys in the programming team. It can have no imagination that is not programmed into it.
A few weeks ago I googled myself because I was slightly worried about the possibility of someone faking my name and found that Google’s AI stated that I was two people (one of which was much of my business and semi-academic publications, the other was part of my middle-aged sporting activity) but that there were also records of my great-grandfather (but not of my cousin called John or my great-uncle called John). So Google’s AI was 75% wrong (maybe that is why Mozilla has quietly dropped it).
And if the job application says that if you haven’t heard from us in X weeks, assume you didn’t get the job, then don’t even apply. The place (HR obviously) is most probably full of women doing their nails and taking menstrual leave, who are too busy to even send a polite e mail.
Nobody tries to close anymore.
If you walk out of a job interview and you didn’t close them into offering you the job there and then, you failed.
A – always
B – be
C – closing
They’ll push back with some guff about needing to consider other candidates, but you keep pressing with as much charm and charisma as you can muster and people will give you almost anything you ask for.
I’ve never got a job based on the interview: it has, every time, because I was obviously as good as (or better than) they needed.
‘You see this watch? You see this watch?’
Nods….
‘This watch cost more than YOUR F%^&ING CAR!!!!!!!’
One of the best scenes in cinematic history….
Wimmin. I’ve just received this from a client. A photographer. Note the level of analysis.
I have a few snags on my set up to ask you about.
I’m a little unsure about how to actually best manage the switching on and off of the monitor and laptop etc. Sounds a bit silly, but I’m worried about always effectively having the laptop charging, if it’s connected to the monitor etc. And generally not sure about shutting things down between one thing and the other.
Also, how best to disconnect when I’m on a Zoom or Teams call, as obviously I can’t look at the monitor, as I’m then not looking at the person I’m speaking with as the camera is in the laptop. So do I literally just unplug it?
I’ve had real ongoing problems this week with my keyboard (though weirdly today it seems to be absolutely fine again), continuously (like after literally typing 10 characters) dropping off and disconnecting. Is that to do with bluetooth? And if so not sure why it was happening.
Another thing is that the whole system seems to be incredibly slow. Actually more slow than the old iMac, which is pretty weird. Like earlier on I sent myself an email to test something and it took about 10 minutes to arrive. But also generally just really slow, on Chrome etc. I have checked with broadband provider and nothing seems amiss there. And nothing else has changed since I had the old mac.
At the base of my Mail window, I have a constant message with blue bar that says ‘Downloading Messages’, right now it’s saying 36 new messages, but they never seem to appear and message doesn’t go away.
Lastly, I’m getting a message from Backblaze saying my files haven’t been backed up for 21 days, though this comes and goes.
Is this client a tennis player, Norm?
Nope. Not a looker, either. Along with her entire family she’s “neurodiverse” and boy, hasn’t she made the taxpayer fork out for it.
Fucking hell.
Can she boil a kettle?
Artificial Intelligence, eh?
I’ve just knocked up a simple website for the wife. Three pages: Home, contact form, GDPR. Ive done in in Rapidweaver on the Mac, because it’s what I have and I used it 15 years ago when doing the copyright campaign. I hate this web stuff with a passion.
Anyway, I’ve knocked up something adequate but it uses a “responsive” theme. It looks fine in mobile/portrait orientation but on desktop/landscape turns to shit, so I’ve spent the best part ot the day in Perplexity trying to get it to fix it for me and keep the layout always in mobile orientation, and stop switching.
Perplexity has spent the whole day bullshitting me. At one point it was asking for layout data I’d already uploaded to it in a css file. It then claimed it could generate a pixel, colour and font-perfect file set from uploaded screenshots of the Rapideaver site. Bollocks it could. And yet, of all things, analysing and generating code ought to be among AI’s strong points, no?
Maybe dem wimmins’ jobs are safe for a while yet.
Or you could ask a professional…
I’m too tight for that.
If their jobs were mechanisable, they probably would have been mechanized already. AI cannot provide efficient methods to mechanize jobs. UNLESS you want your company run by autocorrect software.
Of course they’re mechanisable. They’re rule based operations. They have to be or the people couldn’t do the job.
Think of how they’re learnt. You show someone the basic tasks, give them some to do saying “Ask me if you have a difficulty.” They ask you, you show them, that’s another rule they’ve learnt. Over time they build a rule system library in their heads.
Almost all deskjockey jobs are this. If they weren’t the person would have to understand the entire company structure & work everything out from first principals.
Conspicuously absent is to what detail you codify it.
Conspicuously absent is how you will computerize it.
Conspicuously absent is what the interface will be.
There is not even a visible outline of a possible project.
increased use of AI and automation has all the hallmarks of management who are:
It’s certainly no harder than something like language translation.
It’s something I learned years ago from occasional forays into desk jockeying, when I couldn’t find anything proper to do. It’s far simpler than the people who do it pretend. Most people really aren’t very bright.
Examples of where it has been done?
Surely that is true in every job open to both men and women (not those where one needs fingers half my size or dependant upon appearance)?
A few decades ago a running friend (highly skilled manual worker) informed me how his employer ran interviews “are you married? Have you got a mortgage? – Right you’re in” because the employer reckoned they’d put in all the necessary hours to get the job done.