Young women are falling behind young men in the entry-level job market — but it’s not primarily artificial intelligence that’s to blame, according to the researchers behind one of the country’s most closely watched labor-market trackers. The finding comes from new data shared exclusively with Fortune ahead of its public release tomorrow.
The data comes from an update to the “Canaries Dashboard,” a joint project of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab and ADP Research, led by Erik Brynjolfsson and Nela Richardson that documents how generative AI is reshaping entry-level hiring. Since its debut, the dashboard has established a clear and unsettling pattern: workers age 22 to 25 in the most AI-exposed occupations, like software development and customer service, have seen declining employment growth since ChatGPT’s late-2022 debut, even as overall U.S. employment growth has stayed healthy. That divergence hasn’t reversed — it’s deepened steadily, growing by roughly half a percentage point per month since the researchers’ original paper last year.
