Michael Hixon likely dove professionally for the last time on United States soil at the US Olympic Trials last week. He wasn’t about to go out on a dud.The Amherst native and his partner Andrew Capobianco built a large lead entering Friday’s men’s.
Mandy Hickson was a fast jet pilot. It’s still a rare claim for a woman, although the time when it would have been extraordinary has passed; their gender no longer makes today’s female fighter pilots newsworthy.
Between 1999 and 2002, Hickson flew the Tornado GR4 with the Royal Air Force. She was the UK’s second female fast jet pilot and the story Hickson tells in her recently published book
An Officer, Not A Gentleman is therefore not one of pioneering, but more a tale of pushing open doors already ajar, breaking stereotypes and proving the place of women rather than a woman in the RAF’s fast jet cockpits.
How does all this look in the real world? The ONS classifies all work into 9 Major Groups, from CEOs and Generals in Group 1 (Managers, Directors and Senior Officials) to warehouse staff and farm labourers in Group 9 (Elementary Occupations).
Each group faces very different risks from automation. Often, though not always, the less skilled a job, the more at risk it is. And because women and young people often do less-skilled, casual work, as they start careers, or juggle the childcare which still falls overwhelmingly to them, these two groups face the greatest risk of automation.
ONS analysis shows that 70pc of the roles at high risk of automation are held by women. And it is people aged 20 to 24 years who are most at risk of having their job automated, compared to other age groups (indeed, at 15.7pc their risk is more than 10x the risk of those aged 35-39).