How AI is Affecting Women's Jobs in Nigeria

Walk into any bank branch in Lagos or Abuja and see who is doing the work. Look at the tellers, customer service staff, account officers, and those processing documents. Call a telecom helpline and hear the voice that answers. Visit the administrative floor of a ministry or big company. In many of these places, you will find women.

For over twenty years, these jobs have been quietly important for Nigerian women. They have provided steady salaries, pensions, and a way into the formal economy. These jobs have paid school fees, supported extended families, and helped create a female middle class in our cities.

These are also the jobs that artificial intelligence is changing first.

The evidence is clear

This year, the International Labour Organisation looked into how generative AI affects different types of work. It found that jobs mostly held by women are almost twice as exposed to the technology as jobs held mostly by men, with 29 percent compared to 16 percent. Clerical and administrative roles are the most affected.

The reason is simple. Generative AI is good at tasks that fill much of the work in these jobs, like answering routine questions, drafting letters, entering data, summarising documents, and checking forms.

The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2026, released last week, reached a similar conclusion. It warned that AI could widen gender gaps at work because the roles it is disrupting are where women are concentrated.

Exposure does not always mean job loss. Sometimes AI removes the boring parts of a job and keeps the valuable parts. But whether that happens depends on employers’ decisions, and those decisions often do not favor the people at the bottom of the organization.

Who carries the risk?

I spent over twenty years working on big technology projects in the energy sector. One pattern repeated itself almost every time. When a new system came, the people whose daily work changed the most were often the last to be consulted and the least prepared. They worked in operations, finance support, and administration. Many of them were women.

AI threatens to repeat that pattern on a much larger scale.

Think about what happens when a Nigerian bank introduces a chatbot that can answer most customer questions. The bank saves money. The tech team gets praised. The customer service staff are told to upgrade their skills. But upgrade to what, paid for by whom, and when? A woman working long shifts at a contact center, then caring for children and relatives at home, does not have free evenings for online courses. If retraining is left to personal effort, many women will fall behind.

The risk falls on the people with the least power to shape the change.

Who captures the new jobs?

Now look at the other side. AI is also creating jobs, and many of them pay well. Employers want people who can build AI tools, manage data, protect systems from cyber-attacks, and redesign how businesses run with the new technology.

Women are not getting enough of these roles. The same World Economic Forum report shows that women make up only about one in five AI engineers. In AI companies, women hold about a quarter of top management positions, which is fewer than in similar firms outside the sector. Even among founders, 15 percent of men list AI skills on their profiles compared to just 9 percent of women.

When you look at these findings together, a worrying picture appears. AI is changing the jobs women have today, while the new, better-paying jobs it creates are mostly going to men. If nothing changes, AI will not just maintain the gender gap; it will widen it.

This is not a future issue.

It is easy to think of this as something that will happen later. But it is happening now. Nigerian banks, telecoms companies, and outsourcing firms are already trying out and using AI tools. Decisions about which roles to cut, which to redesign, and who gets training for the new jobs are being made in boardrooms this year.

That is why the conversation about women and AI needs to go beyond celebration. Every time we celebrate a woman who has built an AI startup, and we should, we must also think about the thousands of women whose jobs are being quietly redesigned without them involved.

What should happen now?

First, employers should identify which roles AI will change before introducing it and share that plan with staff. Workers need to know what is coming.

Second, retraining should happen during working hours and be paid for by the organization. Moving an experienced customer service officer into a role supervising AI systems, handling complex complaints, or analyzing customer data costs less than hiring from outside and keeps valuable knowledge in the company.

Third, the government should track who is affected. Nigeria’s National AI Strategy aims for half of those trained in AI skills to be women. That is a good start, but we also need to know if those women land better jobs, not just whether they attended a course.

Fourth, companies should report on gender in their AI teams, just like many now report on gender on their boards. What gets measured tends to get improved.

The real question

AI will not decide on its own who wins and who loses. People will. Bank executives, company boards, regulators, and training providers are making those choices now.

So the question is not whether AI will change women’s work. It already is. The question is whether the women who carry the risk of this change will also get a fair share of its rewards.

If we get it right, AI could free women from repetitive tasks and open doors to better careers. If we get it wrong, we will look back in ten years and wonder how a technology that promised so much pushed so many women backwards.