Gender equality: is artificial intelligence a blessing or a curse?

Since 2010, in the post #Metoo world, the causes and consequences of gender inequalities have come under increasing scrutiny from academics, policy-makers, consumers and the general public. Also during the last decade, concerns about the diffusion of artificial intelligence (AI) have attracted increased attention in the public debate. AI is a "general purpose technology" (GPT), the advances of which create a drop in prediction costs, especially thanks to the "machine learning" domain (Agrawal, Gans & Goldfarb, 2019), meaning the use of data to make predictions. One area that will strongly be impacted by AI is the labor market, a market where gender inequalities have been particularly studied by social scientists. The gender wage gap (the average difference between the wages of men and women) has been deconstructed to investigate the role of attributes (for example differences between men and women in years of education, occupational choices, years of experience…) and the role of discrimination (different effects of the same attributes).