AI could hit women’s back-office jobs hardest, report says

Artificial intelligence is moving into the back office first, and the jobs most exposed are the ones that have long underpinned stable middle-class paychecks in human resources, payroll, billing and clerical work. In the United States, office and administrative support occupations employed 16,856,793 workers in 2024, and 73.4% were women, making this one of the clearest ways the AI economy can land as a gendered labor shock.

The International Labour Organization says female-dominated occupations are almost twice as likely to be exposed to generative AI as male-dominated ones, 29% versus 16%. It also says 16% of women’s jobs fall into the highest-risk GenAI category, compared with 3% of men’s jobs. That gap matters because the jobs most exposed are not abstract white-collar functions. They are the administrative routines that keep companies running, from scheduling and records to payroll and billing.

The ILO has also warned that women remain underrepresented in AI-related jobs, which limits their access to the new work being created as firms adopt the technology. That imbalance raises the stakes for retraining and internal promotion. If companies automate clerical work without moving women into AI-adjacent roles, the result is not just fewer jobs in one corner of the economy. It is a narrowing of the ladder into better-paid work.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects employment in office and administrative support occupations will decline over the 2024-34 decade, even though the group is still expected to generate about 2 million openings a year on average because of replacement needs. That means turnover will remain high even as the overall direction weakens. McKinsey & Company estimated in 2019 that if automation proceeds on a similar scale to major past economic disruptions, about 20% of women employed then could see their jobs displaced by automation by 2030.

Newer research suggests the picture is more complex than simple replacement. PwC’s 2025 Global AI Jobs Barometer found AI-skilled workers earned a 56% wage premium in 2024, and job availability rose even in roles considered highly automatable. The World Economic Forum has argued that women are more exposed to job disruption and less likely to benefit from AI adoption unless companies act deliberately. That makes the central question less about whether AI will reshape office work than who gets retrained, who gets promoted and who is left on the wrong side of the transition.