PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

6. A HARD FACT OF LIFE
The percentage of these workers has been steadily decreasing. The 50
percent point was reached back in 1973. By the year 2000 one expected
less than 40 percent of the workforce in this category. (It should be
noted, however, that such categorization underestimates the amount of
actual “information work” since manual laborers do spend a significant
amount of their time at tasks requiring information handling.)
The fact that women have been taking an increasingly important
role in the workforce is common knowledge. What has been less publicized
is the kind of work they do. Among the information workers 56
percent were women in 1991, largely in clerical, secretarial, and administrative
positions. If one looks at executives, the picture is
different. I plotted the percentage of executives who are women and
again obtained a rising straight line. Women’s role as executives has
been steadily growing but the 50 percent point is not before the year
2000.
A natural substitution process, in the absence of “unnatural” interference,
should proceed to completion. In my graph I compiled data
according to which women executives progressively replaced men during
a twenty-one-year period, although the trend had probably been
established well before that time. Under the persistence of similar conditions,
women should continue the substitution process until eventually
there will be more women executives than men.
Could women really dominate the executive scene? Why not, one
may argue? Not so long ago an imbalance of virtually 100 percent male
executives did not stop society from functioning. An S-curve extrapolation
of a trend over a period comparable to the historical window is
defensible. Such an extrapolation would raise the share of women
among executives to 60 percent by the year 2010. But before we extrapolate
further, we must take into account some other
considerations.
Sometimes substitutions do not reach 100 percent because new
contenders enter the competitive scene. For example, cancer replaces
cardiovascular diseases, but it will never claim 100 percent of all
deaths because AIDS or another new disease will grow to claim a
fraction. Oil replaced coal along a natural trajectory for a while (see
Chapter Seven), but well before a 100 percent substitution was
reached, natural gas began replacing oil. In the case of women replacing
men, however, we can not reason the same way because we
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