TECHNOLOGY AND THE POLARISATION OF UK JOBS: THE IMPACT ON WOMEN

The increasing use of technology by UK firms and the resulting fall in demand for workers who do routine tasks has hit women harder than men. At the same time, increasing demand for highly skilled computer-literate women and sustained demand for low-skilled women mean that wage inequality among women has risen but the overall gender pay gap has narrowed.

These are among the findings of new research by Joanne Lindley, presented at the Royal Economic Society’s 2011 annual conference. Her study of the effects of the increased use of technology by UK firms over the past 15 years finds that:

  • Demand for highly-skilled women who use computers has risen. Demand for low-skilled women has been unaffected by technological advances.
  • Demand for medium-skilled women has fallen because many of these jobs have been replaced by machines, such as the job of a bank teller being replaced by an ATM.
  • Male workers experienced the same rise in demand for those with high skills and sustained demand for low skills. But there was no change in demand for medium-skilled male workers. The main reason seems to be that technological change has provided more jobs for those with better numeracy skills and that more men have satisfied these requirements than women.
  • Because demand for high-skilled women has risen as a result of technical change, there has been a fall in overall wage inequality between men and women.

The author concludes that to reduce gender inequality in the labour market further, the government should focus on better equipping women with the skills to take advantage of the changing structure of the British economy.

More…

It has been widely acknowledged that the price of information technology has fallen over time and this has led to increased computerisation of many of the routine tasks that workers perform.

As a consequence, there has been a fall in the demand for workers that undertake routine tasks in their jobs, while at the same time there has been an increase in the demand for workers that perform relatively more non-routine tasks. One example is the ATM, which has replaced the bank teller clerk but which requires high-skilled labour both for its conceptual design and maintenance, as well as low-skilled labour for the assembly of its components.

This research shows that there have been important gender biases in this process of technical change. Overall the demand for women relative to men has fallen as a consequence of technical change in the UK between 1997 and 2006. This has occurred because of gender biases in the complementarities between computerisation and task inputs. It is shown that numeracy tasks are the main complementarity to technical change and that women possess lower quality numeracy skills compared with men.

Previous research has also shown that routine task intensive jobs were situated in the middle of the earnings distribution and that computerisation has displaced these jobs resulting in job polarisation and increased inequality. Consider again the ATM replacing the averagely skilled bank teller clerk.

This research shows that these skill-demand polarisation patterns hold only for women since the demand for highly skilled women increased, the demand for medium skilled women fell and there was no change in the demand for low skilled women between 1997 and 2006. These polarisation patterns, which have occurred as a consequence of technical change, did not hold for men during this period.

So why has there been a gender bias in technology driven skill-demand polarisation? For men, numeracy, literacy, self-planning and problem solving task inputs are shown to be complementary to complex and moderate computer use. For women, numeracy task inputs are also complementary to complex and moderate computer use, but less so, presumably because the lower quality of their numeracy skills.

Moreover for women, self-planning and problem-solving task inputs are only complementary to simple or general purpose computer use, again suggesting a difference in their quality. These patterns help to explain why technology driven skill-demand polarisation patterns are only observed for women.

Second, the research considers the impact of technical change on the UK gender pay gap, which has fallen over time. Changes in qualifications can only substantially explain the closing of the gender pay gap for women who use computers for moderate and complex procedures. For women in general purpose technology jobs or who do not use computers at all, educational attainment is far less important.

In fact. changes in employment tenure and task inputs explain relatively more than qualifications. But there is evidence that the fall in the UK gender pay gap is largely a consequence of increased demand for highly skilled computer literate women, which is likely to have been driven by technical change.

Finally, over the last 40 years the UK labour market has experienced a substantial increase in the labour force participation and education levels of women. Consequently, to achieve sustainable growth through the creation of a high-skilled economy,it is of increasing importance to use this growth in female labour effectively by reducing gender biases against women and improving the quality of those skills that are complementary to technical change and growth.

ENDS

‘The Gender Dimension of Technical Change, Skills and Task Inputs’ by Dr Jo Lindley, Senior Lecturer in Economics, University of Surrey

Contact:

Jo Lindley

Tel: 07841036266