Women in the Philippines are more at risk of losing their jobs due to the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI), according to the Washington-based multilateral lender World Bank.

"In EAP [East Asia and Pacific], women, the more highly educated, and workers in commerce and trade sectors are more exposed to AI. Women are more highly exposed than men to AI because their jobs involve more cognitive and routine tasks, especially in Malaysia and the Philippines," read the World Bank's report titled "Future Jobs: Robots, Artificial Intelligence, and Digital Platforms in East Asia and Pacific," authored by Omar Arias, Daisuke Fukuzawa, Duong Trung Le, and Aaditya Mattoo.

In general, this is because many women in the Philippines and across the region hold college degrees that have led them to office jobs.

"Higher educational attainment is associated with greater AI exposure. In particular, workers with tertiary education are more highly exposed than workers with secondary education. Furthermore, workers in non-agriculture sectors, especially workers in the commerce sectors, are much more exposed than agricultural workers to AI," the World Bank said.

In the region, the report tagged the Philippines, Malaysia, and Thailand as "relatively more highly exposed than other EAP countries to AI because of their greater engagement with cognitive services."

Besides robust private consumption, the services sector is a key driver of the Philippine economy.

While East Asian and Pacific countries like the Philippines are seen as less exposed to AI risks than advanced economies, the region is also "less well equipped to benefit from it."

The World Bank nonetheless noted that the Philippine government has been instituting reforms to not only AI-proof local jobs but also boost the domestic digital economy as a whole.

For instance, the passage of the Digital Workforce Competitiveness Act in 2023, the launch of the National AI Strategy Roadmap 2.0 and Center for AI Research last year, as well as the crafting of a national jobs master plan that led to the recently launched Trabaho Para sa Bayan (TPB) Plan 2025-2034, were cited by the report as positive developments.

"The digital economy is an increasingly important source of income and jobs in the Philippines, accounting for a fifth of total employment in 2023. The impact of AI will depend on how well-prepared firms, workers, and public policies are to take advantage," it said.

The World Bank cited that as of 2023, the Philippines ranked 65th among 174 countries on the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) AI preparedness index, placing it beneath most of its neighbors in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

"About 26 percent of jobs in the Philippines are considered highly exposed to displacement by digital technologies and possess low complementarity, indicating they are less able to benefit from these technologies. In business process outsourcing (BPO), a key growth and jobs engine in the Philippines, AI could either augment or undermine the country's competitive edge," the World Bank warned.

It does not help that the Philippines' education sector is also lagging behind, making adaptation to and adoption of AI more difficult.

"Poor education quality hinders the ability to harness the potential of new technologies to improve the productivity of Philippine workers. Reading proficiency and mathematics skills are necessary to use AI and automation effectively, but an estimated 91 percent of children of late primary-school age in the Philippines cannot read and understand an age-appropriate text," the World Bank lamented.

To address this, "teacher working conditions, selection processes, and professional development must be enhanced to improve teaching and learning in the country," the report said.

"The recent reform to streamline the curriculum can help teachers and students struggling with many subjects. The new curriculum has a stronger focus on foundational literacy and numeracy and on 21st-century skills. In tertiary education, similar reforms include a curriculum update, faculty training, research and development (R&D), and industry partnership," it added.