AI job losses may hit women harder. Telephone operators show why
Decades before Siri or Alexa or ChatGPT, there was a real person, almost always a woman, at the center of the information world. She was so vital, most long-distance communication could not happen without her.
She was the telephone switch operator, and at one time she was part of the single largest occupation for white, U.S.-born women under age 20.
Today, that job doesn’t exist.
The world is struggling to figure out what the dawn of artificial intelligence means for society, culture and the economy. A lot of ordinary Americans are just wondering what it means for their jobs.
The history of technological progress — from automated telephone switches to the introduction of the washing machine and the personal computer — can offer some guidance. And that guidance suggests women are likely to be among the most affected by AI.
“AI is focused on routine tasks and numbers and finding patterns, and those types of jobs are the clerical, administrative jobs that a lot of women hold,” said Ariane Hegewisch, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. “It’s still 90% of secretaries and clerical workers who are women.”
New research backs this up. The International Labour Organization in March concluded that nearly one in 10 women in high-income countries works in occupations at the highest risk from AI.
Female CDC telephone operator seated at a switchboard, and wearing a traditional headset, reaching for a telephone patch cable, 1974.
Smith Collection | Gado | Archive Photos | Getty Images
The invention that made operators obsolete
In the 1940s, nearly 95% of America’s telephone operators were female. It was a relatively well-paying job for women at the time, and a complicated one: It took months of training to be able to handle the several hundred calls an hour that could come in at peak times. Operators were expected to be speedy, precise — and polite.
These women were hit hard when AT&T introduced the automated telephone switch. It was one of the largest automation investments in history — a close analog to the massive AI investment now underway — and created one of the biggest technological shocks the nation had ever seen.
In the decades after the automatic switch was popularized, an estimated 75,000 operator jobs vanished.
Economists James Feigenbaum from Boston University and Daniel P. Gross from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business studied census and paycheck data from the time and followed local employment trends along the path of AT&T’s rolling investment in switches across the nation.
A group of female telephone operators for the CDC in front of a traditional switchboard, 1974.
Smith Collection | Gado | Archive Photos | Getty Images
“The effect of this shock on incumbent operators was to dispossess many of their jobs and careers,” they wrote in 2020. Many switchboard operators wound up in lower-paying jobs — or dropped out of the workforce entirely, they found.
Economist David Autor says this…
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