GENEVA (ILO News) – Gender imbalances in access to employment and working conditions are greater than previously thought, and progress to reduce them has been disappointingly slow over the past two decades, according to a new report from the ILO.
A new indicator developed by the ILO, the Employment Gap, includes all unemployed people who are interested in finding a job. It paints a much bleaker picture of the situation of women in the world of work than the more commonly used unemployment rate. New data shows that women continue to have much more difficulty finding work than men.
According to the report New data shine light on gender gaps in the labour market, 15% of working-age women worldwide would like to work but are unemployed, compared to 10.5% of men. This gender gap has remained practically unchanged for two decades (2005-2022). By contrast, global unemployment rates for women and men are very similar, because the criteria used to define unemployment tend to disproportionately exclude women.
The labor gap is especially severe in developing countries, where the proportion of women who cannot find a job reaches 24.9% in low-income countries. The corresponding rate for men in the same category is 16.6%, a worryingly high level but significantly lower than that of women.
The report notes that personal and family responsibilities, including unpaid care work, disproportionately affect women. These activities can prevent them from not only having a job, but also actively looking for a job or limit their availability to work at short notice. These criteria are necessary to be considered unemployed, so many women who need a job are not reflected in the unemployment figures.
Gender imbalances in decent work are not limited to access to employment. Although vulnerable employment is widespread for both women and men, women tend to be overrepresented in certain types of vulnerable employment. For example, women are more likely to help out at home or in family businesses than to be self-employed.
This vulnerability, coupled with lower employment rates, has an impact on women’s earnings. Globally, for every dollar of earned income earned by men, women earn only 51 cents.
According to the report, there are significant differences between regions. In low-income and lower-middle-income countries, the gender disparity in labor earnings is much worse: women earn 33 and 29 cents on the dollar, respectively. In high-income and upper-middle-income countries, women’s relative labor earnings reach 58 and 56 cents respectively for every dollar earned by men. This striking disparity in earnings is due both to women’s lower employment levels and their lower median earnings when employed.
The new estimates shed new light on the magnitude of gender disparities in labor markets, underscoring the importance of improving women’s overall participation in employment, expanding their access to employment in all occupations, and addressing blatant differences in the quality of employment that women face.