Women & Work: Shaping Australia’s Future Through an Inclusive Lens
Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping how we work, live, and learn. Across Australia, conversations about automation, productivity, and digital transformation dominate headlines, but less often do we ask who these shifts serve. As AI becomes more embedded in workplaces, its impact on women demands attention.
A recent Australian Parliamentary report, The Potential Impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Australian Workforce, paints a picture of both promise and peril. If steered well, AI can enhance productivity, create new opportunities, and reduce repetitive labour. If left unchecked, it risks widening gender gaps and entrenching inequality.
The Opportunity: Productivity, Progress, and Possibility
AI can be a force multiplier for good. Automation and decision support tools have the potential to free workers, especially women, from time consuming, administrative, or manual tasks, enabling more meaningful and higher value work.
Surveys by the OECD show that workers collaborating with AI often report higher job satisfaction and performance, particularly in professional or managerial roles. For women in fields such as education, healthcare, and social services, where emotional intelligence and relational work are central, AI can help with data entry, scheduling, reporting, and forecasting, giving more time back to human connection. If Australia takes a human centred approach to AI, it can turn technology into an equaliser rather than a divider.
The Risk: A New Digital Divide
The report also issues a warning. AI’s benefits are not automatically equitable.
Women remain underrepresented in technology and leadership roles, the very spaces where AI is being built and deployed. According to OECD data, Australia’s AI skills penetration factor is 0.98 overall, but for women, it’s just 0.37 (compared with 0.92 for men). That gap signals more than unequal access to technical training. It reveals systemic barriers in education pathways, workplace culture, and confidence to reskill.
The occupations most exposed to AI, scientists, engineers, ICT professionals, and managers, are still dominated by men. Meanwhile, many of the least exposed roles, such as cleaning, food preparation, and community care, employ more women and are lower paid. This means that the productivity dividends of AI may accrue where women are least represented.
In short: the AI era could replicate the gender inequalities of the industrial one, unless we act differently this time.
The Gendered Reality of AI Exposure
The report highlights that exposure to AI doesn’t necessarily mean job loss, but it does mean change. For women in administrative or clerical roles, automation may erode parts of their job before new ones are created. For women working part-time, or taking career breaks due to caregiving, re-entry into the AI enabled workforce could be harder without targeted support.
Men currently dominate higher exposure, higher pay roles, and are therefore more likely to benefit from AI’s productivity boosts. Unless deliberate interventions are made, this imbalance may widen existing wage gaps and leadership disparities.
Designing AI for Inclusion
1. Invest in Women’s Skills and Confidence
Training must go beyond coding bootcamps. Australia needs gender responsive learning pathways that acknowledge time constraints, caregiving responsibilities, and varied starting points. Microcredentials, flexible online courses, and workplace mentoring can help women enter AI adjacent fields and leadership roles in data governance, policy, and ethics.
2. Embed AI in Sectors Where Women Work
AI can also uplift traditionally female-dominated sectors such as healthcare, education, and social work, fields where automation can ease administrative burden and enhance decision making. Ensuring women in these sectors help design and deploy these tools is crucial.
3. Support Transition and Re-entry
Women who experience redundancy or restructuring due to AI should have access to retraining incentives, transition funding, and pathways back into growth industries. Social protection systems must recognise non-linear career journeys.
4. Challenge Bias in AI Systems
Algorithmic bias is not theoretical. It can reinforce stereotypes, from hiring to lending decisions. Ensuring diverse voices in AI development, testing, and governance is the best safeguard against bias.
5. Promote Women’s Leadership in AI Policy
Representation matters. Women must be present not just as users or beneficiaries of AI, but as leaders in shaping its ethical frameworks, governance models, and strategic direction.
The Policy Imperative
The Parliamentary report concludes that AI’s long term effect on employment and wages remains uncertain, but what is clear is that policy will make the difference. Australia’s approach must include:
Gender disaggregated data to monitor AI’s labour impacts;
Targeted funding for women’s digital skills programs;
Incentives for gender balanced AI R&D teams;
Collaboration between education, business, and government to build inclusive innovation ecosystems.
This isn’t just about fairness, it’s about national competitiveness. When women participate fully in the digital economy, the whole nation benefits.
AI is not destiny. It’s a tool, one that reflects the values of its creators and users. If women’s voices, perspectives, and leadership are embedded at every stage, from classrooms to boardrooms, then AI can drive not only economic growth but also social progress. Australia has the chance to lead in building an AI future that is both smart and fair. One that values care as much as code, inclusion as much as innovation.
Final Thought
As we enter this new age of intelligence, one truth remains. Technology doesn’t define humanity, we do. And when women are part of designing that future, everyone wins.
