Lady Business: Shadow work and lady AIs; The nuanced power of Oscars fashion
Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the sixtieth issue, published February 28, 2019.
Self-(Service) Care
I’ve been feeling a little ... well, busy, recently, mostly due to good things. (A book launch and a Saudi Arabia magazine feature coming out in the same month are exciting!) But it means that I resent unexpected demands on my time. Which is partially why I became infuriated with my doctor’s office this week, as I tried to reschedule a routine appointment.
“Tried” being the operative word, since my doctor’s office has stopped answering the phone. Instead, they’ve embraced a high-tech, well-funded customer-service app called Klara (yep, yet another female digital assistant) that promises to “delight patients, save staff time, and grow your bottom line.”
Spoiler alert: This patient was not delighted! I know it’s so un-Millennial of me to want to talk on the phone, but: Something that could have been resolved with a two-minute phone call instead turned into a two-day texting extravaganza with a rotating cast of maybe-real, maybe-automated correspondents, who seemed unable to read more than one message back in our chain. A sample exchange:
Me: I need to reschedule my 3/15 appointment for earlier in the month, preferably on 3/8.
Doctor’s office: Ok, the doctor is available on 3/1.
Me: I’m on vacation then; can I reschedule for 3/8?
Doctor’s office: The doctor isn’t available on 3/8, but how about 3/15?
And so on. It started to feel like I was drunkenly chatting with the dude from Memento:
Anyway, my “delight” felt very much beside the point; “saving staff time” and “growing the doctor’s bottom line” (by allowing him to cut back on human receptionists) is the real priority for this business, and for many that have replaced human beings with some sort of technology. That becomes obvious if you read about the VC funding of Klara, in an article that touts how much time and money it saves doctors and their staffs:
Klara, a HIPAA-compliant messaging service, saves up to two hours of time for a medical practice’s staff each day.
… Not only does this save time for the staff, and reach patients where they want to be reached, but it also saves money. According to Klara, doctors estimate that phone calls alone cost between $15 and $20 each, and that prescription renewal calls alone cost around $10,000/year.
What this doesn’t mention: If the doctors and their staffs aren’t doing the work, the work doesn’t go away; it simply gets shifted to their patients -- ie, their paying customers.
Which is what’s known as “shadow work,” related to but in some areas less gendered than the “second shift” housework and childcare women usually get stuck with. (Yay gender equality; at least we’re all in this one together?) As this October Guardian column puts it:
Automation was always supposed to take care of the tedious jobs, so we could enjoy more leisure time. In reality, it’s taken paid work away from humans, while also increasing their burden of shadow work, by transferring tasks from employees to consumers.
These days, we serve not only as our own supermarket clerks, but our own travel agents and airport check-in staff, our own secretaries and petrol station attendants, and our own providers of journalism and entertainment, insofar as we spend hours creating content for Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
A frequent example of shadow work is the self-checkout, at Targets and drugstores and some grocery chains. Sure, I don’t always mind using a self-checkout; there’s usually no line for it at my local CVS, and it can be faster if I’m just buying paper towels and candy or other packaged goods with easily-scanned barcodes. (But using it at the grocery store, where I have to hunt and peck for the right produce code for my Swiss chard or blood oranges? Ugh.)
And more seriously, as this Vox piece points out, the self-checkout is a pretty cynical ploy by large employers, to cut their labor costs even as their overall industry grows:
As of 2016, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 3.5 million Americans were employed as cashiers. The bureau’s 10-year forecast shows only a 1 percent reduction of these positions (just under 31,000 jobs), but this decrease has to be understood in the context of another trend: the rise of retail. The National Retail Federation says the sector grew nearly 4 percent last year and predicts it will do so again this year.
[Adrien] Beck [of the department of criminology at the University of Leicester] tells Vox, “There are a number of reasons why retailers have invested in self-scan technologies. The first and most important is that it enables them to reduce their costs considerably. The largest proportion of a retailer’s cost is their wage bill.”
Which brings us to the most horrifying tech-enabled customer-service story of the week: The Verge’s harrowing investigation into the working conditions and trauma of Facebook’s contract moderators, who get paid $15 per hour to review deluges of toxic social-media posts:
Here is a racist joke. Here is a man having sex with a farm animal. Here is a graphic video of murder recorded by a drug cartel. Some of the posts Miguel reviews are on Facebook, where he says bullying and hate speech are more common; others are on Instagram, where users can post under pseudonyms, and tend to share more violence, nudity, and sexual activity.
… Miguel is very good at his job. He will take the correct action on each of these posts, striving to purge Facebook of its worst content while protecting the maximum amount of legitimate (if uncomfortable) speech. He will spend less than 30 seconds on each item, and he will do this up to 400 times a day.
The article goes into some of the PTSD and coping mechanisms of these contract workers -- one started bringing a gun to work, while others turned into Holocaust deniers -- and points out the vast pay disparity between Facebook’s direct employees ($240,000) and many of these contract moderators ($28,800): “As first responders on platforms with billions of users, they are performing a critical function of modern civil society, while being paid less than half as much as many others who work on the front lines.”
So these are the questions always worth asking of shiny new technology, whether at your doctor’s office or your grocery store or your online haunt of choice: Whose lives, exactly, will this technology make easier? Who is it “delighting” -- and who is now getting stuck with the work that it claims to eliminate?
Lady Bits:
--Book stuff: Thanks to Steve Pomeranz, who asked me about money lessons from famous entrepreneurs on his show; Farnoosh Torabi, who had some terrific questions about my personal finances on her So Money podcast; and Bobbi Rebell, who allowed me to explain exactly why I love credit cards for her Financial Grownup podcast.
--“For the representation of African-Americans in math departments to reach parity with their 13-percent share of the country’s adult population, their ranks would have to increase more than tenfold.” A thorough, thoroughly depressing case study.
--“I am also aware that if people who have spoken out -- like me -- do not take this sort of a stand then things are very unlikely to change at anything like the pace required to protect my daughter’s generation.” Emma Thompson, consistent hero.
--“Suddenly, the balance of power had shifted, and the two women found themselves able to pick and choose.” This piece about Olivia Colman’s (fantastic! And pockets-equipped!) dress for the Academy Awards is a great look at the nuances of awards-season fashion and shifting celebrity power.
--Lady Business will be at the beach next week. See you on March 14!
Thank you for reading, commenting, and subscribing to this newsletter! Please tell your friends to sign up here, let me know what you think about this week's issue, and what else you'd like to see me write about: maria.aspan@gmail.com