PhD Summer School 2024: Gender, AI and Inclusive Work

New technologies and new forms of work are transforming the way people work today representing numerous opportunities in relation to economic growth, productivity and employment. However, digitalisation is more likely to affect men and women differently in the near future, inadvertently perpetuating already existing gender biases and inequalities.

Despite policy commitments to advancing gender equality in the workplace, labour markets remain gender segregated. Women, on average, perform more routine tasks than men and more than half of the working population in the EU still work in occupations dominated by their own gender. Furthermore, women are paid less and hold fewer senior positions. These contextual factors not only shape experiences of women and men differently, when it comes to the integration of new technologies at the workplace and the emergence of new forms of work, but also can create additional risks of exclusion, discrimination and job displacement for female workers.

Many experts foresee that women are more likely to be threatened by the introduction of new technologies in the workplace in the next decade. Since, women, on average, perform more routine tasks than men, a higher number of female workers can be at risk of AI-driven job displacement/technological unemployment. Meanwhile, feminised sectors such as healthcare, education and social care assistance are at lower risk of automation.   These sectors are expected to grow with increasing presence of digital labour platforms that offer atypical work arrangements and contribute to the emergence of new forms of risks, such as the isolation of workers, fragmentation of work and institutionalised undervaluation of work performed by female workers.

In this summer school, we aim to explore the everyday experiences of female workers within the changing nature of work environments due to new technologies and new forms of work from by looking at the interaction between technological change, labour market institutions and gender from an intersectional/critical perspective (including a feminist economics perspective).

We invite submissions related to the topics of everyday experiences of female workers, including

• AI/automation and gender inequality,
• women in the platform economy,
• algorithmic bias in hiring and discrimination in the workplace,
• women in the AI/data/tech driven fields,
• the ways of debiasing data and
• the role of trade unions/social partners in workers’ organising.