Surprisingly, there is a country in the Caribbean where women, albeit slightly, earn more than men. This country is the Dominican Republic, improperly called Santo Domingo, the name of its capital. Here, according to the latest employment data of the last year, men occupy 4% more of the female public in entrepreneurial or managerial activities even if they are less educated. Virtually double that of women.
But the dramatic year of the pandemic has had an impact on women’s employment in a twofold and quite surprising way: on the one hand, women were the most affected by unemployment caused by the COVID-19 crisis in the country but, at the end of the year, their average wage level was slightly higher than that recorded by their male peers.
The data, published by the Social Security Treasury in the document “Panorama del lavoro”, indicate that last January women had an average salary of 26.820,4 pesos per month. This places women’s wages 2.8% higher than that earned on average by men in the same period, which was 26,073.6 pesos per month.
And two other interesting facts that came out in the report highlighted the current education gap between men and women and access to managerial or corporate positions.
While the educational level of the male workforce is concentrated in primary and secondary school, working women have achieved a higher level of education: 33.4% have a university degree, while only 17% of men active on the job market have a university degree. This is according to data from the National Continuous Survey on the Labor Force published by the Central Bank.
According to official data, women mainly carry out professional and intellectual occupations, as office staff or as service workers. Some of them hold higher positions.
Unfortunately, however, despite this difference in preparation and the slight difference in salary in favor of female employment, only 1.44% of employed women held positions as entrepreneurs or managers while, almost 4% of their male peers, had such positions at the end of the third quarter of last year.
According to a recent study presented by the National Statistical Office (ONE), the loss of jobs during the first three quarters of 2020 particularly affected women, especially those who worked in the unofficial market. Meanwhile, in the mainstream economy, women and men have lost their jobs at similar rates.
Although the female population is smaller in the labor market, 60% of the jobs lost in the third quarter of last year were women. Between July and September, last year, Covid-19 burned 328,392 jobs: 197,286 were women, while 131,106 men were unemployed.
