Generative artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping the labor market, with women and young workers experiencing disproportionate job losses as automation eliminates entry-level positions across multiple industries.
Women Face Higher Risk
A United Nations report released in September 2025 revealed that 27.6% of jobs held by women globally are potentially exposed to generative AI automation, compared to 21.1% of men’s roles. The UN’s Gender Snapshot 2025 warns that women dominate professions most vulnerable to AI displacement, including clerical, administrative, and public sector positions.
“The world faces a new disruption and there’s a risk of inequality being coded into the future if we do not learn from past mistakes,” the UN report cautioned. In high-income countries, the disparity is even starker, with women nearly three times more likely than men to lose their jobs to generative AI.
Women remain severely underrepresented in tech fields that could offer protection from AI disruption, comprising just 29% of the global tech workforce and holding only 14% of technology leadership positions. This gap limits women’s access to new, high-paying tech jobs created by AI.
Youth Unemployment Reaches Crisis Levels
Young workers are experiencing the most immediate impact of AI-driven job displacement. A Stanford University study published in August 2025 found that employment for workers aged 22 to 25 in AI-exposed occupations has declined by 13% since late 2022. Software developers in this age group saw employment drop by nearly 20%.
The trend is particularly pronounced in Canada, where youth unemployment for those aged 15 to 24 reached 14.7% in September 2025, the highest level in 15 years outside the pandemic years. Statistics Canada reported that unemployment among students rose 3.1 percentage points compared to the same period in 2024.
“The entry level jobs... work that maybe wasn’t the most complicated work or the most difficult... are increasingly being automated,” Professor James O’Brien of the University of California, Berkeley told CTV Your Morning. He noted that artificial intelligence now writes at least 20% of code in some organizations.
Entry-Level Positions Under Siege
The displacement primarily affects roles where AI automates rather than augments human work. Research by the World Economic Forum indicates that 50% to 60% of typical junior tasks, including report drafting, research synthesis, coding fixes, and data cleaning, can already be executed by AI.
Jacqueline Silver, a recent McGill University computer science graduate, experienced this reality firsthand, spending over a year applying for hundreds of jobs before finding employment. “You might still require someone to refine it or examine it closely, but generally, there’s less need for many individuals to write it anymore since generative AI can handle that,” she said regarding AI’s impact on coding work.
A recent study by the British Standards Institution found that 41% of business leaders across major economies say AI is already enabling them to make redundancies, with 43% expecting to reduce junior roles over the coming year.
Conservative MP Garnett Genuis warned that Canada’s “deepening youth unemployment crisis” will affect young workers’ career trajectories for the rest of their lives. The unemployment situation represents a 15-year high outside pandemic years.
Economic Impact and Future Concerns
The Stanford study found that overall employment continues to grow robustly, but employment growth for young workers in particular has been stagnant since late 2022. In jobs less exposed to AI, young workers have experienced comparable employment growth to older workers. In contrast, workers aged 22 to 25 have experienced a 6% decline in employment from late 2022 to July 2025 in the most AI-exposed occupations, compared to a 6-9% increase for older workers.
The UN report emphasizes that closing the gender digital divide could benefit 343 million women and girls, lift 30 million out of extreme poverty, improve food security for 42 million people, and generate an additional $1.5 trillion in global growth by 2030.
To safeguard decades of progress in women’s participation in the labor force, the report recommends investing in women’s digital and technical skills, facilitating smooth transitions across economic sectors, and implementing gender-responsive labor and social protection policies.
“Another ‘she-cession’ is rearing its head: Women are...” 2025. CNN, October 17, 2025. https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/17/economy/us-women-workforce-shecession-return.
“Canada posts surprise jump in job gains in September, unemployment rate unchanged.” 2025. Reuters, October 10, 2025. https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/sustainable-finance-reporting/canada-posts-surprise-jump-job-gains-september-unemployment-rate-unchanged-2025-10-10/.
“UN report warns AI poses greater threat to women’s jobs.” 2025. Economic Times, September 22, 2025. https://economictimes.com/news/international/world-news/un-report-warns-ai-poses-greater-threat-to-womens-jobs-calls-for-urgent-action-on-gender-digital-divide/articleshow/124048551.cms.
“59 AI Job Statistics: Future of U.S. Jobs.” 2025. National University, September 21, 2025. https://www.nu.edu/blog/ai-job-statistics/.
“UN Report Warns AI Threatens Women’s Jobs, Calls for Urgent...” 2025. Entrepreneur India, September 26, 2025. https://www.entrepreneur.com/en-in/news-and-trends/un-report-warns-ai-threatens-womens-jobs-calls-for-urgent/497608.
Brynjolfsson, Erik, Bharat Chandar, and Ruyu Chen. 2025. “Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence.” Stanford Digital Economy Lab, August 26, 2025. https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Canaries_BrynjolfssonChandarChen.pdf.
“AI threatens to push youth out of entry-level jobs.” 2025. CTV News, October 20, 2025. https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/article/artificial-intelligence-threatening-to-push-young-people-out-of-entry-level-jobs/.
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As you highlight, "Young workers are experiencing the most immediate impact of AI-driven job displacement." This is particularly disturbing for boys, a group that is underperforming women in school. In this way, automation will disaffect more young males than it would young females, assuming we are discussing STEM jobs. And while males occupy more STEM jobs then females, the issue facing both sexes is a critical one.
If anything, young women seem to have the advantage here--given that they, on average, have a heightened degree of social skills compared to males, they seem to actually have a shield against the brunt of lower level automation as opposed to young males who are comparably deficient in social skills.
With many hard skill jobs being automated, soft skill jobs will be sought. And given women's natural tendency to be more emotionally intelligent than men, it's hard to see how young men could outperform young women in this domain.