Women are bearing the brunt of jobs losses brought on by increased automation, while men are benefiting from the best-paid new jobs on the market, according to new research from the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA). Up to 400,000 roles held by women in the public sector, banking and retail have been lost since 2011 due to a combination of automation and austerity measures, the RSA said. Female workers have further lost out because of the fall in private-sector roles such as retail cashiers, personal assistants and hairdressers, according to the analysis. The RSA found that programmers and software developers as well as HR managers and directors were among the top 20 fastest growing occupations, while retail cashiers and checkout operators were among the fastest shrinking. Many jobs in the new economy are well paid but the research found only one in 20 new coders and programmers are women.

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