How does the world of work 4.0 affect women's employment? Will it become easier to be employed full-time? Or will it remain difficult to reconcile family and career in the digitalised world? Answers to these questions were sought by around 90 participants from academia and practice (primarily companies, job centres and local authorities) as well as students from Fulda University of Applied Sciences on 14 February 2019 at the symposium "Women in the world of work 4.0 - opportunities and risks for employment". Prof. Dr. Dagmar Preißing from the Department of Economics, representing the Centre for Society and Sustainability (CeSSt) at Fulda University of Applied Sciences, invited them to attend. For good reason: because what the new world of work means for women's gainful employment has hardly been addressed in public debates so far.
And so numerous female academics from Fulda University of Applied Sciences and other universities examined the topic from all sides: From the legal point of view, from the point of view of sustainable human resource management, but also from a technical point of view. Can machine learning reinforce prejudices? was one of the questions. From Fulda University of Applied Sciences, the following were present: Prof. Dr Stefanie Deinert, Prof. Dr Martine Herpers, Prof. Dr Irina Kohler, Prof. Dr Claudia Kreipl, Prof. Dr Dagmar Preißing, Prof. Dr Anja Thies.
The most important messages:
- The lower qualified a job is, the sooner and faster it will be replaced by machines. The importance of lifelong learning, education and high qualification is therefore increasing. It is also clear that digital skills will be increasingly needed in all occupations.
- The core feature of future work is its flexibilisation in terms of time and place through click- and crowdworking. The compatibility of work and family through the flexibilisation of Work 4.0 is repeatedly praised as the great advantage for women. Therefore, it can also be assumed that the share of women in mobile work will increase. But: The client sets the working hours - and that can also be at the weekend.
- In addition, flexibilisation means irregular pay, no social security systems and a lack of planning security, since click and crowdworke
are (solo) self-employed. The current earning opportunities also seem precarious. Moreover, we know that in crowdworking, women have a 44 percent lower income than men.
- Machine learning can reproduce gender biases, perpetuating and even reinforcing unequal social relations. A machine-assisted applicant selection, for example, is therefore not automatically more objective.
- The decisive factor is a suitable legal framework for the flexibilised new working relationships and forms. Without it, precarious work will increase. The framework of today's labour law does not yet fit the developments of these new developments. The hoped-for advantage of gaining access to the labour market through digitalisation and being able to better reconcile work and family life is cancelled out the moment one can no longer make a living from one's job. Only when we use digitalisation to improve social interaction will it create value for us as a society.
Poster Award
The conference ended with a poster award ceremony. Students from Fulda University of Applied Sciences had submitted posters on the topic of "Women in the World of Work 4.0" to an expert jury. The three best posters were awarded prizes at the conference.
The winners are
1st place: Julian Bolz, Thomas Kretzer, Carlos Kriegsmann, Philipp Kriegsmann and Frederik Reinker presented their winning poster on the topic of "Middle Management Leadership in the World of Work 4.0 - Male or Female?"
2nd place: Pia Barth, Darja Busch, Alessia Husfeldt, Anne-Marie Lewis, Sarah Menz
Topic: Iceland: role model for gender equality
3rd place: Anna Dörfler, Katharina Hahn, Tobias Paul, Stefanie Raab-Faber, Anna-Lena Reibold
Topic: Gender Pay Gap
Conference documentation
The conference papers can be found in the anthology:
