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Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis - Regional Economist, Jan 2005 by Engemann, Kristie M, Friedberg, Leora, Owyang, Michael T

Sex

Over the course of the past few decades, women's average job tenure has been affected by two opposing forces. On one hand, the factors that have exerted negative influence on men's tenure also affected women's tenure. On the other hand, an increase in the proportion of career-oriented women has raised women's average job tenure. Economist Karen Lombard found that between 1975 and 1991, women's exit rates from employment declined, especially among those with young children. This led to an increase in tenure that outweighed the negative forces experienced by both sexes. As women's labor force participation stabilized in the 1990s, other effects, such as those discussed in the following sections, became dominant, and women's tenure fell.

Technology

The surge in technological advancement, especially in computer use, during the past 25 years has affected labor markets in numerous ways. Many new technologies are thought to be "skillbiased"-that is, replacing unskilled workers while raising the demand for skilled workers. For example, technological advancements have replaced workers in many areas of financial operations, inventory control and other clerical tasks. On the other hand, many new technologies require workers to acquire new skills to design and operate them. Additional evidence shows that new technologies require not just greater but also new skills, including not only computer use but also other more complex decision-making tasks left over by the automation of routine tasks. All these factors suggest that technological changes, which may have grown more rapid in recent years, induce a reshuffling of workers with different sets of skills across jobs.

Rodriguez and Zavodny provided evidence that technological innovations have led to more rapid churning of skilled workers through jobs, even while raising overall demand for skilled relative to unskilled workers. This increase in job flow due to technological change leads to a decline in average tenure because these workers are switching jobs more often than in the past. For example, although a college graduate's likelihood of displacement remained lower than that of a person who did not complete high school during the 198387 and 1993-97 periods, the probability of becoming displaced increased more for the college graduate between the two sample periods. This demonstrates that some technological advances place more rigorous demands on the level of skill required for operation, causing skilled workers to be negatively affected by job loss in these cases.

In a separate paper, Zavodny studied the relationship between technology and the rates of job separation among young adult men. She found that, in industries with higher ratios of scientists and engineers to total employment, which she took as an indicator of technology intensity, college graduates were much more likely to voluntarily leave a job, while nongraduates were more often terminated. This distinction signals a shift toward higher demand for skilled workers and lowered demand (via job destruction) for unskilled workers.