How the Feminisation of Work Could Transform Our World for the Better

Or, at the very least, push back against the devaluation of ‘women’s work’

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We recently moved from a modern flat to an older house and, well, our robot vacuum cleaner wasn’t happy about it.

It still works, sucking up dead skin cells and kitty litter as it navigates its new surroundings, but it now needs quite a bit of help getting around. There are thresholds between rooms and multiple stair sections, including one between platforms on the same floor. There are also areas it simply can’t clean because it’s too big to fit. That’s the thing with smart gadgets. Unless you live in a newly built home or one designed specifically for this kind of technology — a smart house — they aren’t necessarily all that smart.

And although we imagine cleaning to be a simple task, something that ‘anyone’ can do — not coincidentally because it’s primarily women who do it, either for poverty wages or for free — self-operating maid robots like Rosey in The Jetsons are still just a pipe dream.

Today’s cutting-edge technologies might be able to recite all the digits of pi or beat any of us at chess, but they don’t have the same advantages we do. They lack the human hand and foot — multifunctional marvels shaped by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. They struggle to adapt to unpredictable environments, something we, humans, had to master to survive. And, just as crucially, they also lack the very skills we frequently dismiss as ‘soft’ or ‘feminine.’

It’s then not hard to see how the (human) labour market could be increasingly shaped by those capabilities — and by women. How it could become, in so many ways, more and more feminised.

In fact, that shift already seems to be underway.

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The feminisation of work can be understood in two ways. The first, and more commonly discussed, refers to an increasing proportion of the total workforce being female.

This has been pretty easy to spot. Over the last century, and especially in the past few decades, more and more women have entered the labour market, including fields that were once dominated by, or even reserved for, men. (Women have always worked, of course, but much of this work has been either unpaid, invisible, underappreciated, or forgotten.) Today, around half of all women worldwide are in the labour force. In some countries, there are nearly as many women working as men or even more. There’s also been a steady increase in female breadwinners. According to Pew Research Center data, the share of marriages in the US where the wife is the sole or primary breadwinner has risen from 5% in 1972 to 16%.

And while these gains in the labour market haven’t been a silver bullet for women — we still do the bulk of unpaid domestic and care work and earn, on average, just 84 cents for every dollar men make — they have certainly helped us gain at least some sense of independence. And avoid being trapped in marriages with men who claim superiority over the ‘female species’ but don’t know how to operate a washing machine.

Will we see this trend continue throughout the following years? Most likely, yes. Not only because many young women are opting out of or delaying marriage and childbirth — which still tend to dampen women’s labour force participation — but also because, and for the first time, women increasingly outnumber men in higher education enrollment. In the US, women comprised 58% of all college students in 2020, up from 56.6% six years earlier. Meanwhile, in the EU, 48% of young women have completed the highest level of education, compared to just 37% of men.

Another way in which the labour market can become feminised is through the growing share of so-called ‘pink-collar’ jobs. These are professions that have historically been dominated by women — such as nursing, teaching, and other social and care work — and, not coincidentally, are often dismissed as less demanding and less essential to society, resulting in lower pay.

Yet, despite the persistent undervaluation of female-dominated sectors like care and education, it’s precisely these fields that are projected to see significant growth in the coming decade, with some reports suggesting they’re set for the highest job growth by 2030. After all, it’s no secret that the world’s population is rapidly ageing. According to UN estimates, the number of people aged 65 years or older worldwide is anticipated to more than double, rising from 761 million in 2021 to 1.6 billion in 2050.

Clearly, someone will have to provide the necessary care and support for this growing number of elderly individuals. Someone else will also need to look after and educate the children of those who do that work.

And those ‘someones’ will almost certainly be us — humans.

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It’s tough to say how many jobs robots will ultimately take over. Some studies suggest as many as half, while others estimate closer to 10%.

But there’s at least a bit more consensus on which industries will be hit the hardest. Many recent studies indicate that automation is most likely to replace jobs in construction, manufacturing, transportation and certain white-collar fields like data processing and analysis — in other words, industries where men still make up most of the workforce. Meanwhile, sectors where women constitute a significant share — such as education, healthcare and social work — are generally considered far less automatable. In fact, some analyses even suggest that the more female-dominated an industry is, the lower the risk of automation. (There are certainly exceptions, though, such as secretarial and administrative roles.)

After all, it’s far easier to imagine a fully automated factory, warehouse, or train station than a fully automated hospital, care home, kindergarten, or classroom. Or a self-driving truck than a robot-maid.

Machines might be capable of extraordinary tasks, but they can’t truly feel or understand human emotions — at least not yet, and perhaps not ever. They can’t easily build trust in relationships. Or navigate complex social situations. Or know how to bring out the best in others. So, how could they provide high-quality childcare? How could they entirely replace human companionship? How could they replicate the countless, often invisible, acts of care and emotional labour — performed mainly by women — that hold families, relationships, workplaces, and societies together?

It’s the skills we condescendingly term as ‘soft’ and ‘feminine’ that may soon be in higher demand than ever, precisely because technology won’t be able to replicate them well enough. Researcher and writer Katherine Marçal also explores this in her latest book, Mother of Invention, noting:

The qualities that will remain once artificial intelligence eventually outdoes us in rational thought are largely those that we lazily tend to label as ‘feminine’. And therefore look down on economically.

It’s then not difficult to predict which gender might have an easier time adapting to this second machine age and finding another job, even if robots took over their previous one. Needless to say, it won’t be the one conditioned practically from birth to prioritise competition, toughness and detachment over emotional intelligence, communication, and care. And that could have serious consequences for our world.

If new technologies do wipe out a significant number of menial and analytical jobs done primarily by men, much of what remains will be in care work. Some men will have no choice but to retrain and enter these fields — or at least pivot away from typically masculine industries. But will they? For generations, men have been taught that ‘women’s work’ is lesser, if not outright degrading. After all, calling a boy ‘like a girl’ is still widely used as an insult. Just like telling women to ‘go back to the kitchen.’ And so, if you’re a man raised to see this kind of labour beneath you, you might resist doing it — even if it’s your only option.

A similar issue comes up with the rise of female breadwinners. Studies already show that men who earn less than their wives tend to report higher levels of anxiety, dissatisfaction, and unhappiness. That’s because many still tie their sense of identity to being the ‘provider’ — just as they do to working in male-dominated fields. But if men won’t be the breadwinners and refuse to be caregivers, who will they be? What will they do? Will they form what Yuval Noah Harari has termed the ‘useless class’ — a group of people who are not just unemployed but essentially unemployable?

That’s hardly a recipe for a happy or stable society.

Adapting to a world of increasing automation and feminisation of the labour market will undoubtedly require a significant rethink of our economic and political systems.

But a massive cultural shift as well.

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There is convincing evidence that for most of human history, we relied on complex cooperative caretaking practices in which everyone in the community, not just women, helped feed, teach, and care for children. The same goes for caring for older people and people with disabilities.

Care work has always been human work. And one of the most, if not the most, important backbones of our society. So, if anything, it’s the relatively recent development of the nuclear family system, in which it’s women who are expected to carry out the lion’s share of this essential labour, that might not be very ‘normal’ for our species.

The good news is that some of us already understand this.

In recent years, men have finally started to move into professions historically dominated by women, particularly in the healthcare sector. The number of male registered nurses in the US, for instance, has nearly tripled since the early 2000s, going from around 140,000 in 2000 to 400,000 in 2023. And although jobs associated with women tend to be economically devalued, research shows that wages in those fields actually tend to increase when men join them. (It’s essentially the reverse of what happens when women enter traditionally male industries. Go figure.)

But there’s also something else that could happen as a result: the normalisation of men doing both ‘pink-collar’ work as well as care and domestic labour at home. As writer Jessica Grose points out in a recent piece for The New York Times:

If we start seeing caring in society as a less gendered activity, not as a low-status job, more men may be eager to do it.

This, in turn, could finally reduce, or even eliminate, the burden of the so-called ‘second shift’ women still overwhelmingly shoulder — the household and childcare duties that follow paid work — and bring us closer to a more equal, less gender-biased world.

The fact that women have been steadily joining the workforce can have — and has already had — a positive effect, too. In her 2021 book, Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity, labour economist and Nobel prize winner Claudia Goldin shows that female participation in the workplace can transform the very nature of work. It led to, for example, the rethinking of work-life balance and more opportunities for flexible work, as women tend to need more flexible working patterns due to childcare responsibilities. Research also shows that having more women in the workplace can increase job satisfaction and performance — particularly for men. Meanwhile, workplaces that prioritise rigid ‘masculinity’ and often discourage women from joining them tend to have some of the highest rates of stress, burnout, and turnover.

The feminisation of work is simply its humanisation. It’s seeing people as people, not machines. And it’s recognising that, yes, half of the world’s population’s contributions — ‘women’s work’ — are, and have always been, extremely valuable and needed. Just like all the qualities we’ve deemed ‘soft and ‘feminine.’

Of course, there’s no guarantee that we will continue on this trajectory. Perhaps the rising threat to women’s autonomy will once again push women out of paid employment. Or perhaps the machines we build won’t be nearly as good at replacing us as we thought. Or perhaps they will be so good they’ll replace all jobs — including those we believed required that special human touch.

Still, whatever the future might bring, we shouldn’t stop imagining a better way, a better world. And striving to once again value what has helped our species survive all along.

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I don’t plan on getting rid of my robo-vacuum anytime soon. It gets the job done, even if I have to trail behind it like I would with a drunk friend, making sure it doesn’t get stuck or fall down the stairs.

Still, it’s hardly the only machine still relying on humans to get by. I’ve recently seen several videos of delivery robots stranded in awkward spots, waiting for human passersby to rescue them. And we do.

Ironically, as machines continue to evolve, they might serve as a reminder of what truly defines and distinguishes humanity — not necessarily intelligence or rational thought, as we once believed, but empathy, emotions, and relationships.

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