Piano for the Office

In 1906, typing was marketed to women as 'piano for the office'. Respectable. Safe. A skill that wouldn't threaten anyone.

I was reading Anthropic's new Economic Index and one line stopped my bleary-eyed morning scroll: workers most exposed to AI automation are 16 percentage points more likely to be female.

This is not because AI targets women (at least, I very much hope not). It's because of the ball that started rolling in the late 19th century.

Because AI is exceptionally good at cognitive, text-based, routine information work - administrative assistants, data entry, customer service, paralegals, bookkeepers. The exact roles women were funneled into for a century.

The jobs that were "safe" are turning out to be the ones most easily automated.

Meanwhile, the companies building these tools are overwhelmingly run by men.

And there's a Zenger/Folkman study of 60,000 leadership assessments showing women leaders are rated more effective during periods of crisis and change - with the gap actually widening when things get turbulent.

So we have one group building the displacement, another group absorbing it, and the group that tends to perform best when everything's shifting largely absent from the rooms where these decisions get made.

And somewhere in the margins, young men are struggling too - just differently.

I don't have a neat takeaway. But 1906 is still echoing, and nobody's at the piano.