According to Fortune, artificial intelligence is reshaping work faster than policy or leadership can adapt, with U.S. companies reporting record productivity while payrolls barely rise. Goldman Sachs estimates that AI automation could affect the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs worldwide, and investors are cheering the efficiency gains. The pattern is familiar from history: during the Great Depression, dozens of U.S. states enacted “marriage bars” that barred married women from employment, while post-war governments closed child-care centers and urged women out of factories. Now commentator Helen Andrews’ essay “Overcoming the Feminization of Culture” has drawn unusual attention with over 175,000 views, arguing that women’s growing presence has made society “empathic rather than rational” – an argument that resonates precisely because economic anxiety seeks moral explanation.
History repeating itself
Here’s the thing: we’ve seen this movie before. When structural change threatens people’s status, nostalgia for hierarchy often masquerades as rational analysis. During the Great Depression, they called it “protecting male breadwinners.” After World War II, it was about giving jobs to returning soldiers. In post-war Japan and Australia, they created the “male breadwinner compact.” Each time, the policy was framed as moral restoration. But it was really economic triage.
And now? AI-driven “headcount-light” companies can scale output without adding workers. Knowledge-based roles we thought were safe – legal research, accounting, customer service – are being rewritten by software. For mid-career professionals, retraining programs rarely keep pace with technology‘s curve. So what happens when people feel economically threatened? They look for someone to blame.
The economic paradox
This is where it gets really concerning. In the short term, investors love companies that grow without hiring. But long-term prosperity depends on broad participation in income and consumption. The International Monetary Fund estimates that raising women’s labor force participation to men’s levels could expand GDP by up to 35% in some economies.
Meanwhile, governments are cutting social supports like child care subsidies and workforce training. If job losses accelerate, the temptation to frame gender regression as cultural renewal will rise. But excluding women from paid work doesn’t just shrink the labor force – it makes it older. Women now supply the bulk of new labor-force entrants in the 25-to-54 age group. When they step back or get pushed out, we end up with a workforce that’s smaller, less dynamic, and aging faster.
This is a governance crisis
For boards and investors, this isn’t some social-policy sidebar – it’s a core governance issue. Directors should be pressing management to quantify how AI will change headcount, skill mix, and pay equity over the next five years. They need to examine whether algorithmic HR tools introduce hidden bias. Human-capital disclosures should explain how automation affects opportunity by gender and age.
The larger question is one of social license. Can companies thrive indefinitely in economies that can’t sustain full employment? A short-term efficiency story can quickly become a long-term demand problem. And if gender backlash gains political traction, it becomes a reputational nightmare too.
What comes next?
When societies fear obsolescence, they often seek order through exclusion. The impulse is as old as industrialization itself. Schools pushed girls out of science when jobs were scarce. Factories barred women from higher-paying trades. Companies in the 1980s celebrated “decisive” leadership as automation hollowed out middle management.
So here we are again. The technology has changed, but the instinct hasn’t. AI will redefine how humans create value. Whether it also redefines who is allowed to create value? That depends on the choices leaders make right now. Efficiency can make a company stronger and a society brittle at the same time. What we choose to optimize will tell us what kind of future we deserve.
