Will the Great Automation reverse the Great Feminisation?

Once the mass job displacement starts, many current political debates will seem frivolous

It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.
George Orwell, 1984, 1949

If civilisation had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.
Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae, 1991

Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition… No civilization in human history has ever experimented with letting women control so many vital institutions of our society, from political parties to universities to our largest businesses. Even where women do not hold the top spots, women set the tone in these organizations, such that a male CEO must operate within the limits set by his human resources VP.
Helen Andrews, Compact, 16/10/25

[Amazon’s] projection of doubling sales by 2033 without workforce expansion implies labor productivity (measured as revenue per employee) must double over eight years, a sustained rate without modern precedent.
John Brewton, 29/10/25

We also got a taste of the answer to AI’s biggest question: how will we actually generate returns from the technology? [It] will rest on AI’s ability to cut labour costs, given these are the biggest expense within most businesses. If the companies paying for AI products and services cannot reduce headcount through the replacement of jobs or the augmentation of tasks, they will dial back their AI experiments, and it will become much harder to generate a return on the trillions of dollars that will be invested in AI infrastructure in the next few years… If the majority of companies find they can take out, say, 10 per cent of jobs, we are looking at a big change to the economy and the community that clearly we’re not prepared for.
Chanticleer, AFR, 29/10/25

Every legacy and indie media pundit is apparently obliged to weigh in on Helen Andrews’ Great Feminisation hypothesis, so here goes.

I’m a little bemused that Andrews’ observations have caused such a ruckus. After all, people have been commenting on men’s and women’s different operating systems since men and women were invented.

Also, it’s not like sex differences haven’t been exhaustively studied since second-wave feminism kicked off six decades ago. The second-most famous book ever written by an Australian feminist is Dr Anne Summers’ Damned Whores and God’s Police. The first part of the title is self-explanatory. The second half is too, I guess, but just to be clear it refers to respectable Antipodean women’s eagerness to root out sinful unorthodoxy.

While the ladies might have got the sex-differences theorising started, there’s been no shortage of similar pontificating undertaken by manosphere denizens of late. I’ve lost count of the Longhouse think pieces I’ve now read.

A lukewarm take on Andrews’ argument
In the midst of the populist, anti-woke vibe shift of 2025, it seems many people, including not a few women, are open to considering the possibility that femininity has a shadow side.

I’m in broad agreement with Andrews’ arguments. But like my fellow Substackers, I do have some notes.

Andrews, a conservative, falls into the progressive trap of downplaying class. Despite detailing all the bastions of Professional Managerial Class (PMC) authority that are now 51 per cent or more female – law schools, medical schools, HR departments, the world’s most influential newspaper, etc – she doesn’t address the different operating systems of PMC females and blue-collar women. The latter are considerably less woke than the former.

Andrews is also glibly dismissive of the claim that wokery is a (PMC-friendly) mutation of Marxism.

By the 1960s, it was clear to leftist intellectuals that, contra Marx, the Anglosphere proletariat was not about to rise up and seize the means of production. This resulted in those leftist intellectuals – many of whom were embarking on their long march through the institutions – pinning their revolutionary hopes on various sacralised minorities. And one sacralised majority – women.

For a right-leaning American, Andrews is also curiously uninterested in how progressive politics functions as a substitute religion for its nominally agnostic/atheist but frequently self-righteously moralistic adherents.

But many other members of the punditocracy have now made these kinds of points.

What I’d like to explore is whether the Great Feminisation will be reversed.

Andrews claims this could happen if the affirmative-action thumb is taken off the scale.

Right now we have a nominally meritocratic system in which it is illegal for women to lose. Let’s make hiring meritocratic in substance and not just name, and we will see how it shakes out. Make it legal to have a masculine office culture again. Remove the HR lady’s veto power.

Even if Andrews got her wish, it would take years for the Great Feminisation to start unwinding, just as it took years for it to gather momentum. That is, after all, how social change plays out.

Technological change works differently, which brings us to the question of which occupations will be vaporised first and last by AI-driven automation.

Are female office workers the new male factory workers?
Andrews notes:

Women can sue their bosses for running a workplace that feels like a fraternity house, but men can’t sue when their workplace feels like a Montessori kindergarten… So if women are thriving more in the modern workplace, is that really because they are outcompeting men? Or is it because the rules have been changed to favor them?

Whatever your opinion of the wider point, dear reader, the crucial word in that passage is “rules”.

Women are keener on rules than men, which is why frat houses are more free-wheeling environments than Montessori kindergartens.

Feminised industries typically run on rules and anything that runs on rules can, sooner or later, be automated. This means, for instance, journalists have more reason to panic than plumbers.

(Tradesmen are more likely to work unsupervised, demonstrate initiative and make executive decisions than many white-collar workers.)

Andrews notes:

The same trajectory can be seen in many professions: a pioneering generation of women in the 1960s and ’70s; increasing female representation through the 1980s and ’90s; and gender parity finally arriving, at least in the younger cohorts, in the 2010s or 2020s. In 1974, only 10 percent of New York Times reporters were female. The New York Times staff became majority female in 2018 and today the female share is 55 percent.

I don’t know how many women were plumbers in 1974, but I’m guessing it was close to zero. Things have changed slightly, but the proportion of plumbers who are female remains well under five per cent, even in the most enlightened of Western nations.

Occupations in the crosshairs
Drawing on reputable sources, my AI research assistant was kind enough to compile the following list of industries most and least likely to be impacted by AI-driven automation between now and 2030.

Industries most at risk by 2030

1. Clerical and back-office admin. (Female dominated)

2. Customer support/contact centres/Business Process Outsourcing. (Female dominated)

3. Accounting, bookkeeping and basic finance ops. (Gender balanced but trending female)

4. Insurance operations. (Gender balanced)

5. Banking back-office and retail banking roles. (Gender balanced)

6. Marketing and basic content/media ops. (Gender balanced)

7. Basic legal services and e-discovery support. (Gender balanced but trending female)

8. Programming-adjacent junior roles. (Male dominated)

9. Retail checkout and routine sales support. (Female dominated)

10. Manufacturing and warehouse. (Male dominated)

Industries least at risk by 2030

1. Skilled construction and trades. (Overwhelmingly male)

2. Aged care, disability support and childcare. (Overwhelming female)

3. Nursing and allied health. (Overwhelmingly female)

4. Cleaning and sanitation. (Gender balanced)

5. Hospitality and food service. (Gender balanced)

6. Security, policing and emergency response. (Male dominated)

7. Education. (Female dominated)

8. High-end craft/repair/installation. (Male dominated)

9. Field engineering and maintenance. (Male dominated)

10. Community and social services. (Female dominated)
    

A quick glance might give the impression that, as our American friends say, it’s a wash. Those doing predictable, rule-bound digital tasks have cause for concern, regardless of their identity category.

But the IMF, OECD, WEF, IMF and ILO have all warned that the jobs typically done by women are at higher risk of being transformed by AI than those typically done by men.

Can men and women unite in the face of a common enemy?
As you may have heard, Amazon plans to replace half a million jobs with robots and automate 75 per cent of its operations.

Amazon’s workforce skews slightly male but is relatively gender balanced.

As Nobel Prize-winning MIT professor Daron Acemoglu notes in the New York Times article that broke this story:

Nobody else has the same incentive as Amazon to find the way to automate. Once they work out how to do this profitably, it will spread to others, too… one of the biggest employers in the United States will become a net job destroyer, not a net job creator.

Amazon didn’t confirm the reports about its job-shedding plans to the New York Times, but it didn’t exactly deny them either.

A spokeswoman for Amazon said the documents reflected the viewpoint of one group inside the company and noted that Amazon planned to hire 250,000 people for the coming holiday season, though the company declined to say how many of those roles would be permanent.

As CEO Andy Jassy warned Amazon staff back in June:

As we roll out more Generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done… in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.

I’d predict it will soon seem inexplicable that so many invested so much intellectual and emotional energy in identity politics cause célèbres over the last decade, and so little time in worrying about and planning for looming job displacement.

Perhaps in a year or two, Andrews will be writing about the Great Automation, the moment when the Great Workplace War of the Sexes ended forever.

Not with victory for one side, but with pink slips all around.