According to Eurostat, in 2022 in Europe, in the 25-34 age range, 48% of women had higher education compared to only 37% of men. At the same time, universities in the USA are seeing their campuses depopulated by male students and are beginning to wonder whether they should start creating programs to support men.
In view of this worrying situation, it can be argued that men continue to predominate in STEM careers, where they account for about 70%, and in careers such as computer science, even 80% of students. STEM careers are the basis of science and are the ones that generate large increases in productivity in industry and, therefore, the importance of the male sex in the organization chart of human power is not compromised in the long term. However, this is not going to be the case, because there is a technology that has come to change everything: artificial intelligence.
If many men are particularly attracted to the sciences and engineering, it is because they seek knowledge of matter and processes in their different forms. If the majority of women fill the faculties of law, medicine or literature in general, it is because they are attracted to the human. Until now, for the growth of scientific knowledge and for industrial development, knowledge of the environment was paramount and, therefore, power and good salaries went to a large extent to those who have this knowledge.
But what is going to happen in a world where the AI has all the knowledge of the environment and what is going to be needed is people with the ability to extract that knowledge as quickly and efficiently as possible? IF AI knows how to program, we don’t need programmers, we need someone to tell it how to do it. And the way to communicate with AI is not as with a program, whose operation we need to know, but as with a person to whom we have to provide data, explain and convince. You don’t need to know the process, you need to get something from someone. Here comes the huge change that we are not seeing coming: this is what women are particularly good at. The least, and the most desirable thing to expect is a rebalancing of opportunities between the sexes.
But looking at the defection of men in the universities of the developed world, the outlook is much bleaker. More studies give more capacity, so in twenty years it is to be expected that women will have acquired a real preponderance in our world. If in recent years men have already appeared out of place and confused about their role in the world, we will soon be much worse off. Dropping out of school, neglect of responsibilities, mental illness and domestic violence, our problems have only just begun.
