Bots and Birthrates

Technology and social change, forever intertwined

In 1990, I published The Female Advantage: Women’s Way of Leadership, the first book to focus on what women have to contribute as leaders rather than how they need to change and adapt. It was the tail end of the female, bow-tie, Working Girl era, when working women were expected to mimic men.

Specifically, they were urged to take their cues from the kind of hard-charging executives then viewed as epitomizing male success. Examples were everywhere: “Chainsaw” Al Dunlap, whose rabid cost-cutting threw the companies he headed into turmoil; Bob Crandall of American Airlines, who blamed his company’s poor performance during his tenure on flight attendants seeking a miniscule raise; and business journalism’s go-to cover boy, Jack Welch, whose harmful hollowing out of GE did not become apparent until after he left.

Expecting women to behave like hyper-aggressive men was never going to help anyone succeed, which is what motivated me to write the book. As I quickly discovered, it was both a challenging and excellent time to suggest a different approach.

Challenging because the idea of women’s leadership was pretty much new. As a result, there were virtually no company programs or internal groups to bring women together or help them develop the skills and relationships they needed both to position themselves and to make the best use of their talents in an environment that was indifferent at best, hostile at worst.

But the timing was also excellent because of the widespread interest in how demographic and technological changes were then intersecting, creating an economy in which human knowledge and talent would be the prime determinants of value.

Best-selling futurists like John Naisbitt (Megatrends) and Alvin Toffler (PowerShift), as well as management guru Peter Drucker, with his remarkable and enduring Post-Capitalist Society, argued that the confluence of technological and demographic shifts would require leaders capable of transforming their organizations’ cultures by encouraging hearts-and-minds participation people at every level.

And certainly, there could be no more significant demographic change than the entry of one half of a human race into the workplace. This provided me an exciting platform from which to launch the proposition that what were considered to be women’s values and skills might be just what organizations needed to move forward.

By contrast, today, interest in demographics among futurists and business leaders has waned. Technology, in particular the rapid development of AI, is now assumed to be the chief driver of organizational change, the force that will almost single-handedly reshape how we work (or don’t work) in the decades ahead.

I began pondering this notion after a conversation last week with friend and colleague Diana Wu David, a futurist, coach, and consultant based in Hong Kong. Diana works all over east Asia, and is fascinated by the trends reshaping the region’s innovative and agile economies.

Chief among these trends is the rapid decline in birth rates across Asia. This is occurring in most developed economies, but not as rapidly as in South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Macau, and Hong Kong. With the exception of Ukraine, for obvious and tragic reasons, the lowest fertility rates in the world are all found in East Asia.

Because a declining birthrate diminishes the size of a nation’s workforce, which in turn slows the potential for economic growth, a typical response to this trend has been to loosen restrictions on immigration. Western Europe began adopting this approach decades ago as birth rates plunged. In Asia, only Singapore has a history of welcoming immigrants, though its neighbors are starting to become more accepting. Even Japan, long averse to any notion of non-Japanese citizens being helpflu, has begun cautiously opening its doors as its already anemic birthrate plunges to historic lows.

East Asia is also following western Europe’s lead in generously providing for those who have children, especially three or more. Benefits include cash payments, extended and mandated parental leave, free maternal healthcare, subsidized or free day care, even free baby clothes and diapers. Mongolia, in addition to large cash payments, has begun awarding national medals of honor to women who bear five children.

Notice I said women. For Mongolia, like western Europe, does not limit support to married couples. Encouraging a population sufficient to maintain a competitive economy is apparently of greater concern than the desire to punish single mothers, a recurring policy idea in the United States.

It’s notable that, with the exception of occasional slowdowns in the rate of birthrate decline, efforts to persuade women to have children in East Asia and much of Europe have not been especially successful. Though South Korea has gone to extraordinary lengths to try to incentivize childbearing, births continue to plunge. Clearly structural factors are at work.

Nobel economist Claudia Goldin notes that gender roles in the country have not kept pace with technological development, with women spending nearly 3 hours a day more on housework than men– hardly an incentive for women to marry in country where they also are highly educated and work outside the home. And research by the Korean Federation of Trade Unions projects that Koreans in their 20s would need to work 86 years in order to buy a family apartment in Seoul– surely a disincentive for starting a family.

Until recently, the US has been an outlier among advanced economies, with a lower decline in birthrates, much of it the result of robust immigration. But as anti-immigrant sentiment has grown, the US is in danger of losing the edge that has made it an economic colossus.

You might think that the descent into xenophobia would at least result in policies that encourage larger families, such as access to affordable daycare. But you would be wrong. Instead, childless women in the US are vilified as selfish careerists who prefer life with a cat, or a dog, to caring for children.

Although some would argument that women having more opportunities is depressing the birthrate, this is not necessarily true. In Japan and Italy, whose birthrates are among the world’s 10 lowest, barely 50% of women work. And in Japan, women hold less than 10% of managerial and professional positions, despite assertive efforts by the government to improve the number, and high levels of education among Japanese women.

As seemed obvious to futurists in the 90s, a confluence of demographic and technological change requires cultural adjustment and may have unintended or amplifying effects. This is worth considering as we ponder the impact of AI.

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