An unemployed man is 35% more likely to find a job than a woman

2023-05-13 06:30:13

An unemployed man is 35% more likely to rejoin the labor market and find a job than a woman. Just as gender is a relevant variable for employability, so is age, as an unemployed person under 25 has a 70% greater chance of re-employment than someone 55 or older. These are two of the pieces of evidence collected in the study published this week by the Bank of Spain, in which it urges the Government to reform unemployment benefits, increasing their amount but cutting their duration.

While the Executive is finalizing a reform of the unemployment benefit system, the Bank of Spain has wanted to contribute its opinion to the debate with a battery of data and simulations on how long it takes the unemployed in Spain to exhaust their benefit and how many do so sooner of finding another job, among others. The study, framed within the annual report of the banking supervisor, quantifies the effect of already known biases in the labor market and on the basis of which administrations guide their policies.

For example, women, young people, over 45 or victims of male violence are priority groups for attention at public employment offices. And the Bank of Spain, through its own simulation, determines that an unemployed man has an 8.1% chance of finding a job, compared to 6% for a woman in the same situation. The gap is still greater between two groups of priority attention, young people and the unemployed. And the fact is that those under 25 have an 8.4% probability of joining, compared to 5% of those over 55.

There are currently a total of 2.7 million unemployed people in Spain registered with Sepe as job seekers. However, not all of them receive a benefit or allowance that compensates for their lack of work income and guarantees them a minimum to live on. Around three out of 10 do not collect any income from Sepe. And it is that either they did not contribute enough when they had a job or they have already used up what they contributed.

In Spain, to be able to collect four months of unemployment, the minimum provided, you must have contributed the equivalent of an entire year. And to collect the maximum period of unemployment, two consecutive years of benefit, you must have previously contributed the equivalent of six or more years.

And, according to data from the Bank of Spain, almost half of the unemployed who receive benefits exhaust it before six months, due to their poor previous work history or the instability of contributions. The same researchers warn of the high polarization among the unemployed in Spain, since while half are collecting the benefit for less than six months before re-engaging elsewhere, 18% end up exhausting it after two years without work .

More performance, less time

The idea launched by the Bank of Spain is to spend the same money on unemployment protection policies, but in a different way, with the aim that people find work sooner. And the mechanism they suggest is to increase the amount of benefits at the same time that the maximum amount of collection is reduced. Currently the amount of the contributory benefit ranges between 560 and 1,575 gross euros per month.

The Bank of Spain detects that increasing the amount of benefits at the same time as reducing their duration in time would increase, on average, the probability of finding a job by 0.11 points. With particular incidence among the unemployed with less education and the elderly.