Question

What are the working conditions of the majority of women in the job market?

Answer 1

In almost every country in the world, men are more likely to participate in labor markets than women. However, these gender differences in participation rates have been narrowing substantially in recent decades. In this post we discuss how and why these changes are taking place. The first section in this article provides an overview of the 'stylized facts', including an overview of women's participation in the informal economy and unpaid care work. The second section provides an overview of the key factors that have been driving the broad trends. Around the world men tend to participate in labor markets more frequently than women. However, it only takes a glimpse of the data to see that there are huge differences across societies. The following visualization provides a picture of how men and women compare today in terms of participation in labor markets, country by country. Shown is the female-to-male ratio in labor force participation rates (expressed in percent). These figures show estimates from the International Labor Organization (ILO). These are 'modelled estimates' in the sense that the ILO produces them after harmonizing various data sources to improve comparability across countries.  As we can see, the numbers for most countries are well below 100%, which means that the participation of women tends to be lower than that of men. Yet differences are outstanding: in countries such as Syria or Algeria, the ratio is below 25%. In contrast, in Laos, Mozambique, Rwanda, Malawi and Togo, the relationship is close to, or even slightly above 100% (i.e. there is gender parity in labor force participation or even a higher share of women participating in the labor market than men).