🔒 Women Aren't Invited to the AI Revolution

If you work at an office or a lab or really anywhere with computers then it’s almost certain that you’ve been pressured lately to use AI tools in your work. Your CEO is worried that the company will fall behind the competition if employees are slow at embracing the immense productivity boost that comes with incorporating AI into their daily tasks.

 But there’s a big problem. Working women are considerably more reluctant to embrace AI. As with most major societal discrepancies between the sexes, the favored explanation is that women are feeling too many feelings about the situation. It’s enough to force many businessmen into the ostensibly uncomfortable position of asking whether retaining feeemale employees is in the best interests of the company or whether “tough choices” need to be made.

 This isn’t necessarily against the plan.

 Let’s take a step back, first: There are some pretty weird contradictions inherent to the whole right-libertarian tech-supremacy thing that’s going Hulkamania on us right now. Tech oligarchs despise the unemployed as ungrateful “takers” and think everyone should work for a salary until they’re in the grave, preferably one that they dug themselves. Only those who contribute meaningfully to the machine to their dying breath are worthy of participating in society. Elon Musk made that abundantly clear recently when he came out publicly in favor of taking the right to vote away from “takers,” which we can reasonably assume means anyone who receives any kind of government assistance. 

At the same time, these same men are absolutely fanatic about removing as many people from gainful employment as possible. The oligarchs aren’t job creators so much as job terminators—Musk is especially notorious for workplace reduction to the extent that he fired all the office cleaners upon taking over Twitter, forcing the few remaining staff to bring in their own toilet paper and clean the toilets themselves (presumably in their break time, if they are even allowed a break.) This made him such a folk hero to the right that Trump hired him to do the same thing to the federal government.

 And, of course, the proverbial elephant in the room here is the long-promised AI jobpocalypse.

The excitement on the right about the predicted coming mass layoffs is palpable: What’s that, the world wouldn’t end if your job went away? Then you’re nothing but inefficient capital bloat, a living example of waste, fraud, and abuse. Get ready for your new career as a Starbucks barista for the short time that job remains viable before the Tesla Optimus robot learns how to grind beans.

 So they don’t want unemployed people to exist, because they’re parasites, but they don’t want them being paid to work either, because that’s inefficiency and waste. It would make sense if they wanted you to just die, I guess, but if you’re familiar at all with these guys I’m sure you’re aware that something high on their agenda is to massively increase the population. If you’re not having as many children as possible, you’re a selfish misanthrope.

 So that’s the third contradiction. The three vectors of judgment are: If you’re unemployed, you’re a parasite; if you’re employed at a level beneath CEO you’re likely redundant bloat; in either case, if you’re childless, you’re guilty of not increasing the number of categories A and B, which is also bad somehow.

 So what the fuck are we supposed to do?

 Stop taking orders from unelected tech CEOs, for one thing. But more to the point, the contradictions tend to fade when you consider the specifics of their ideal: They don’t want to remove people from society in broad, random swaths. The goal is a reorganization. We can already see how it’s panning out.

Of the number of people who lost their jobs in America in the first year of Trump’s second term, the vast majority were women. It’s not exactly that scene from The Handmaid’s Tale where the nervous schlub has to fire every woman in the office because “it’s the law now,” but it’s not too far from that either. Outside of Gilead, it’s not “the law” that women be cast out of employment, but in Trump’s America, what is or is not “the law” tends to be spoken in the language of nudges and winks. 

Particularly in the federal government, where the president’s word is the law until (maybe) a judge says otherwise, employment demographics have been affected by Trump’s executive orders banning “DEI.” This is of course one of those nudge-and-wink terms—ostensibly, it refers to people who were hired based on their being a woman or a minority rather than credentials or merit. The motte-and-bailey in MAGA world is that, in a society where people were hired only on merit, you wouldn’t see any women or minorities.

 It’s not subtle that the Trump administration is all about masculinity. Pete Hegseth thinks that expelling women from the military and pumping grunts full of testosterone is going to solve America’s effeminacy problem. They celebrate a beer-guzzling FBI director and UFC fights on the White House lawn. And this is exactly what you would expect from Christian theocrats like Hegseth and 1980s yuppie culture fossils like Donald Trump, but rarely do we speak of how this gung-ho alpha masculinity attitude maps onto the stuttering, insecure, atheistic and eternally beta-coded geek set of Silicon Valley—your Musks, Zucks, Thiels, and Altmans.

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