March is Women’s History Month and a time to take a look at how women are progressing, or otherwise.
Alas, the news for women in the United States isn’t good, and the future is foreboding as they are about to lose 6 million jobs to artificial intelligence. Work traditionally done by women — secretaries, receptionists, payroll clerks and customer service representatives — is likely to lose jobs. Except for healthcare, semi-skilled workers are the most vulnerable.
I must confess to a longtime interest in the women’s movement, particularly the path of women in journalism. In 1964, in New York, my first wife, Doreen, a stupendously gifted English journalist, and I created what we liked to believe was the very first women’s liberation magazine. Ms., co-founded by Gloria Steinem, didn’t launch until 1971.
Our magazine was “Women Now,” and we only got out one issue before we ran out of money. As I have said often, “It didn’t liberate any women but liberated all of our money,” which was utterly insufficient for the undertaking. However, I remained interested in the progress of women in society.
When I was at The Washington Post about six years later, I was elected president of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild. Women’s rights and their path in journalism were on the agenda, propelled as much by our talented business agent, Brian Flores, as by me.
The guild held conferences (including a national one in Chicago), formed study groups, and made the path of women an issue at the bargaining table. The Post’s editor, Ben Bradlee, asked if I was doing this “to improve my love life.” I wasn’t, and it didn’t.
Women could write themselves to glory, but it was a lot harder from the women’s pages or if you weren’t considered for reasons of your sex for a foreign assignment or war coverage. However, I think Marguerite Higgins, Martha Gellhorn and Dorothy Kilgallen were towering talents who circled above their contemporaries, male and female.
In the time I have been watching women’s issues, I have seen great progress and now backsliding.
I have seen progress in the numbers of women editors, film directors, board members and company heads. Yet many women are hired, I believe, because it is possible to pay them less, on the assumption that they will be supported by a partner or husband. The old thinking.
In the 1960s in Britain, jobs were advertised with one salary for men and another, a lower one, for women for the same work. In that sense, things have improved. But women worldwide are still losing ground in abhorrent ways. They encounter gender oppression, including honor killings in Muslim societies, female circumcision in parts of Africa, and femicide in some Caribbean and Latin American countries.
In the democracies, there is a backward movement for women as the bad ways of old are championed as “conservative” or “traditional.” Worse, reproductive rights have been scaled back or denied, and overt efforts to promote equality have been prohibited.
The unwelcome news isn’t at an end: Enter AI.
Several studies, including those by the United Nations and McKinsey & Co., conclude that women will bear the brunt of the first American AI-induced layoffs. This will be felt between now and 2030, and as many as 6 million women may have to find new jobs or quit the job market altogether.
In the years ahead, it is going to be harder for women than men as the first waves of what I call the “AI adjustment” hit the workplace. The political class needs to absorb this reality and to start thinking about the nature of work when AI starts snatching jobs by the millions.
So far, political talk has been to eschew the looming future — a future that, initially at least, threatens women most.
Women’s history is about to have a new chapter written.
