Employment has shifted from routine towards abstract jobs in the U.S. since the 1970s, and this trend has been stronger among women. This paper studies the contribution of the Quiet Revolution—a contemporaneous change in women’s life-cycle labor force participation from intermittent to continuous—to this reallocation of labor. I develop and calibrate an equilibrium Roy model featuring the Quiet Revolution and automation technology. Quantitatively, absent the Quiet Revolution, the model generates almost none of the observed shift of women from routine to abstract jobs between 1970 and 2010, and the aggregate reallocation is smaller, especially before 2000.
Suggested citation:
Uniat, Lindsey. 2026. “The Quiet Revolution and the Decline of Routine Jobs.” Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Working Paper 2026-01. https://doi.org/10.24148/wp2026-01