Abstract
Abstract Digitalization offers a variety of opportunities for female empowerment and for a more equal female participation in labor markets, financial markets, and entrepreneurship. Currently, digitalization seems to favor female labor force, since women face on average lower risk of being replaced by machines, as compared to men. Women’s often superior social skills represent a comparative advantage in the digital age, and this is particularly so when social skills are complemented with higher education and advanced digital literacy. However, the same barriers and deficits that obstruct women’s current advancement in many countries may deprive them from many beneficial opportunities in the digital age, including new entrepreneurial opportunities. Major efforts by policy makers are required to invalidate these barriers. New digital technologies should be used more decisively to achieve the goal of gender equality.
Highlights
New developments in the fields of artificial intelligence, big data, cloud computing and mobile robotics that gave rise to Industry 4.0 offer new opportunities for women to improve their participation in economic life
The existing gender gaps in labor market inclusion, financial inclusion, and digital gender gaps can prevent women from benefiting from enormous opportunities that arise in the digital age, leading to persistent gender inequalities
To understand whether the risk of digitization differs for occupations currently held by men and women, we follow the approach by Frey and Osborne (2017) and combine their estimations of digitalization probabilities with data from a large international survey of adults, OECD’s “Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies” (PIAAC)
Summary
Labor market opportunities for women in the digital age Economics Discussion Papers, No 2018-18. Suggested Citation: Krieger-Boden, Christiane; Sorgner, Alina (2018) : Labor market opportunities for women in the digital age, Economics Discussion Papers, No 2018-18, Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW), Kiel. Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes. You are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence
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