In the UK, persistent occupational segregation and underrepresentation of women in STEM pathways highlight the risks women face in the labour market. Emerging literature demonstrates that women are overrepresented in automatable roles and face disproportionate barriers to benefiting from advanced digital technologies, predicting a potential widening of gender inequality by strengthened wage disparities and diverging career trajectories.
This project investigates whether differential exposure to AI and advanced technologies across industries exacerbates or reduces the gender wage gap in the UK. It combines firm-level measures of AI exposure and digital technology adoption from the Digit Employers’ Survey with individual-level data from the Labour Force Survey or the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings. Using econometric models with industry and year fixed effects, the analysis estimates the impact of AI on wage outcomes by gender and examines whether internal high-level digital training mitigates these effects.