It’s time to put risks to women’s workplace participation due to AI-related job displacement firmly on the agenda. Because it’s happening now. And it’s affecting knowledge-based workers, middle management, and layers where women have typically been overrepresented, or at least closer to equally represented, when compared with men. This AI-created jobs displacement is occurring just as we’re getting our heads around the other AI-driven threats to women’s safety, gender equality and equity, including bias embedded in algorithms and the rising use of AI-generated deepfakes that are far more likely to target women than men. Atlassian’s announcement on Thursday that it will be cutting 1,600 jobs globally due to AI reducing the headcount it needs, is just the latest in a string of company announcements that should signal greater conversations on the issue. CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes told staff that, “It would be disingenuous to pretend AI doesn’t change the mix of skills we need or the number of roles required in certain areas. It does.” Last month, another Australian company, WiseTech, announced it would be making 2000 people redundant in the coming years, as it also turns to AI. Internationally, Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Block (formerly known as Square), announced via X that they will be laying off 4,000 of their 10,000 employees due to AI-driven productivity gains. The company immediately saw a 20 per cent uptick in the hours after the announcement. It followed January’s news from Amazon regarding its plans to cut around 16,000 corporate jobs in 2026 as it further embraces AI, following earlier reductions in 2025. We’ve also heard in recent weeks that Morgan Stanley is cutting 2500 jobs, Mastercard is removing 1400, eBay is axing 800, and Pinterest is cutting around 15 per cent of its workforce. Many of the companies announcing cuts are not in distress, and the news of their cuts has, in some cases, led to surging stock prices. While there is no gendered breakdown of who is and will be losing such jobs, as yet, and some might believe that, as tech companies, more men than women will be affected, research from multiple sources forecasts over and over again that women will lose roles to AI at a faster rate than men. The UN Women’s Gender Snapshot 2025 found that women are almost twice as likely as men to work in jobs that are at high risk of automation, with 4.7 per cent of working women affected compared to 2.4 per cent of working men. And that disparity gets worse in high-income countries like Australia and New Zealand, where 9.6 per cent of women’s jobs are at high risk compared with 3.5 per cent of men. Research released last week by Anthropic predicted labour market impacts of AI based on early evidence finds (in Anthropic’s own words) that “workers in the most exposed professions are more likely to be older, female, more educated, and higher-paid.” <img decoding="async" src="https://womensagenda.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/msi2123.png" /> Women’s jobs in wealthy countries are three times more likely to be automated than men’s jobs, according to research suggesting the AI labour shock will hit women first. In January, the Brookings Institution reported that among the 37.1 million US workers in occupations most exposed to AI, around six million would struggle to adapt if displaced—and shockingly, around 86 per cent of these 6 million are women. The researchers say that pay, savings, diverse skills and professional networks can support people to pivot, but that women concentrated in administrative and clerical roles are less likely to have such buffers. And the World Economic Forum has long projected that female-dominated clerical and administrative roles will face the highest displacement risk from AI. The job losses will likely be across middle management, rather than in senior management, the top end of employers that continues to be dominated by men globally. While men continue to dominate coding and computer engineering roles, some tech companies are quick to adopt more powerful AI tools, and the AI benefits will quickly extend to other areas, especially those across the knowledge economy. And especially again, across middle management. Women in Digital CEO Holly Hunt highlights the fact AI erodes occupations “task by task” rather than eliminating them overnight. She says that for women, this is compounded by the fact that when AI-driven restructuring occurs, those with more fragmented tenure (such as due to career-breaking and working part-time) may be more exposed to redundancy. This leads us to the current surge in companies announcing job losses in the past few weeks, and to the fact that AI displacement across knowledge work is no longer a feature of the future but is ramping up right now. These large rounds of job cuts are largely driven by incredibly rapid improvements in AI, as increasingly capable tools take on increasingly complex tasks, such as coding. Just spend an hour or so experimenting with Claude Code, regardless of your tech expertise, and you’ll quickly see how fast the sands are shifting. It’s liberating to experience this — to do things like creating new websites in minutes and even developing your own project management system tailored to what you actually need. But using the tool — one that goes well beyond the more standard large language models like ChatGPT — will leave you pondering what comes next. Not merely what the jobs market will look like over the next five or so years, but even where things will land at the end of 2026. Some of the more pessimistic among us even question just what desk jobs will be left? A question that led Andrew Yang to pen a much-shared piece called “The End of the Office”, suggesting that if your job involves sitting in an office, then your role is at risk. Indeed, it was telling to hear Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark saying he couldn’t believe how much the tech had changed since he took parental leave. This is the founder of one of the world’s biggest AI companies, and he doesn’t appear to have taken much time out from the office. Can you imagine what it feels like for someone who takes a year out, or is planning to return to the workforce after a five- or so-year stint to care for family? Now, beyond the potential impacts on women’s workforce participation in Australia and globally. What else will these fast-moving shifts in what work gets automated bring? What does it do to finances, relationships, our sense of purpose? The flow-on impacts across the full economy will be significant. When large numbers of people are out of work and financial stress rises, social order and safety break down. The biggest impact of job losses can be felt behind closed doors, where the pressures accumulate on households, leading to more rent and mortgage stress, more food insecurity and in some cases, more domestic and family violence. The AI displacement issue may be unfolding slowly, given current news events. It’s a few thousand jobs here, another thousand there and perhaps a few dozen or so across various workplaces not large enough for such news to make headlines. But it’s happening now, and not as some “by 2030!” event. It’s critical that every policymaker and employer consider the gendered implications of the shift. So far, we’re seeing little beyond tokenistic “retraining” efforts that, at their current pace of deployment, will come too late and be too simplistic for those most affected. 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