Gen Z Women Lag Men in Entry-Level Jobs, New Data Shows

Young women are experiencing slower employment growth than young men in the entry-level job market, according to new data from the Stanford Digital Economy Lab and ADP Research. This finding, derived from an update to the "Canaries Dashboard," which tracks generative AI's impact on hiring, indicates that artificial intelligence is not the primary driver of this disparity. The research, led by Erik Brynjolfsson and Nela Richardson, analyzes payroll data for workers aged 22 to 25.

Since the debut of ChatGPT in late 2022, the dashboard has observed a sharp decline in employment for workers in AI-exposed occupations, such as software development and customer service, despite overall U.S. employment growth remaining robust. This divergence has widened, with employment growth for these workers decreasing by approximately half a percentage point per month since the researchers' initial paper. The latest data, broken down by gender for the first time, shows that young women in the analyzed sample exhibit weaker employment growth compared to young men within the same age bracket.

The researchers identified two contributing factors: women are more frequently employed in AI-exposed occupations, and they experience somewhat slower employment growth than men across all levels of AI exposure. Specifically, 43.8% of women work in the most AI-exposed job categories and 21.2% in the second-most-exposed, compared to 32.4% and 18.1% of men, respectively. However, when isolating the impact of AI exposure on growth, the connection proved less direct.

Women's slower employment growth is evident in jobs with low AI exposure as much as in those with high exposure. In the least-exposed quintile of jobs, employment among 22-to-25-year-old women grew by only 1.3% annually after late 2022, contrasting with the growth observed among their male counterparts. This suggests that while occupational mix plays a significant role due to women's higher concentration in AI-vulnerable sectors, other factors are also contributing to the widening gender gap in entry-level hiring.