For years, economists have predicted that artificial intelligence would hollow out the labor market. Machines would write the code, analyze the contracts, draft the emails, and automate the work that once defined white-collar status.
What would remain, they argued, would be the human skills that machines can’t replicate: caregiving, teaching, coaching, mentoring, relationship-building.
That sounds, at first glance, like a victory for women.
After all, women dominate many of those professions. Women are the teachers, nurses, therapists, caregivers, social workers, wellness practitioners, and community builders who have long carried the emotional infrastructure of society. If AI makes relational work more valuable, shouldn’t the women already doing it finally benefit?
History suggests something more complicated may happen.
A growing body of economic research suggests that labor markets do not simply value work based on importance. They also value work based on who is doing it.
One of the most striking findings came from research by the sociologist Paula England and colleagues, who studied what happened when women entered occupations in large numbers over the second half of the twentieth century. The results were difficult to ignore: When women moved into a field, pay often declined, even for the exact same work men had previously been doing. When men entered fields in larger numbers, pay and prestige often rose.
Computer programming offers perhaps the clearest example. Early programming work was considered tedious, clerical, and relatively low status. Women were heavily represented in the field. But as programming became more lucrative and prestigious, men increasingly entered it. Pay rose. Status rose. The cultural perception of the work changed.
We have seen versions of this pattern repeatedly: in biology, design, recreation, hospitality and countless other sectors. Once women start doing a job, England observed in a 2016 interview with The New York Times, “it just doesn’t look like it’s as important to the bottom line or requires as much skill.”
Now AI may be setting up the same dynamic on a much larger scale.
Recent work by the economist Alex Imas argues that as AI drives down the cost of producing knowledge and commodity goods, scarcity will migrate toward relational experiences and human connection. As societies grow wealthier through automation, demand may increasingly concentrate around things that still feel deeply human: trust, care, taste, guidance, presence, empathy.
If that happens, the sectors long dismissed as “soft” may become some of the most economically important parts of the labor market.
In just the past year, much of the job growth in the American economy has come from healthcare and social assistance, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. Those are sectors dominated by women. California, long associated with Big Tech and the entertainment industry, is increasingly being propped up by healthcare employment, particularly eldercare, behavioral health and home health services. The economy is already becoming more relational. Compensation, however, has yet to follow.
And that creates a paradox at the center of the AI economy.
The relational economy is already female-dominated because society undervalued it for decades.
Care work has historically been treated less as specialized labor than as an extension of women’s natural identity. Teaching young children, tending to the elderly, managing emotional dynamics, building community, these were often framed as feminine instincts rather than economically valuable skills. The low pay reflected that assumption.
What happens if those sectors suddenly become growth industries?
If history is any guide, men will enter them in larger numbers. They always do when prestige and money arrive.
And when that happens, wages may rise, but not necessarily for the women who built those professions in the first place.
That is the uncomfortable possibility at the center of the AI economy.
The women already working in those fields negotiated their salaries against a baseline shaped by decades of gender discounting. New entrants may arrive after the market has already hiked the price. Men entering the sector may be viewed differently—not as “naturally nurturing,” but as leadership coaches, wellness experts or human-performance specialists.
The language changes. The status changes. The compensation changes.
None of this means men should not enter relational professions. A society that values caregiving more highly would be a genuine improvement over one that systematically undervalues it.
But it raises a harder question: When society finally decides this work matters, who benefits from that recognition?
The risk is not that men will enter the relational economy. It is that they will enter at the new, higher baseline while the women already there remain tethered to the old one.
And when that happens, wages may rise, but not necessarily for the women who built those professions in the first place.