Global Employment Trends for Women

1. Overview During the 1980s and 1990s women’s participation in labour markets worldwide grew substantially. This gave rise to expectations that increased opportunities and economic autonomy for women would bring greater gender equality. To h elp determine the extent to which such hopes are being realized, it is necessary to analyse wome n’s labour market trends in more detail. To this end, the Global Employment Trends for Women Brief 2007 focuses on whether the tendency toward increased participation has continued more recently and whether women have found enough decent and productive jobs to really enable them to use th eir potential in the labour market and achieve economic independence. The approach is based on updates and analysis of a number of major labour market indicators. These include: labour force participation; unemploy ment; sector and status of employment; wages/earnings; and education and skills. Taken tog ether, they show whether women who want to work actually do so, whether women find it harder t o get a job than men, differences in the type of work done by women and men and equality of treatmen in areas ranging from pay to education and training. Main findings are: • In absolute numbers, more women than ever before ar e participating in labour markets worldwide. They are either in work or actively look ing for a job. • This overall figure only tells part of the story, h owever. During the past ten years, the labour force participation rate (the share of worki ng-age women who work or are seeking work) stopped growing, with many regions re gist ring declines. This reversal is notable, even though it partially reflects great er participation of young women in education. • More women than ever before are actually in work . The female share of total employment stayed almost unchanged at 40 percent in 2006 (from 39.7 per cent 10 years ago). • At the same time, more women than ever before are u nemployed, with the rate of women’s unemployment (6.6 per cent) higher than tha t of men (6.1 per cent). • Women are more likely to work in low productivity j obs in agriculture and services. Women’s share in industrial employment is much smal ler than men’s and has decreased over the last ten years. • The poorer the region, the greater the likelihood t hat women work as unpaid contributing family members 2 or low-income own-account workers. Female