Gender employment gap - why less women work

Introduction

In many countries, the labor market is well dominated by men. There is an existing and growing gap in gender employment. The situation is such that a high percentage of men are gainfully employed than women. Closing this gap is really crucial to the growth of most economies whether developing or advanced. This issue of huge gaps in gender employment was well analyzed in a recent International Labor Organization (ILO) article.

The gender employment gap is part of some economic challenges included in the May 2024 World Employment and Social Outlook. This publication is done monthly by the ILO to explore the state of global employment, highlighting key areas of strength and weakness across member countries. The May 2024 edition looked at key metrics that explain why more men are found in virtually every workspace than women. We will look at those key data. But before then, lets see why more women are needed in the job sector.

More women should be employed.

The world probably needs more women to be gainfully employed. A lot of reasons obviously support that assertion. To begin, women are often heavy spenders. Personal care goods and services make up a significant need for women. In most developing economies, these self-care service providers account for a significant portion of small and medium enterprises. Their major customers are the female population.

So for women to spend on anything including their self-care items, they need money. Being gainfully employed provides a steady stream of income from where the spending could be done. So women help lots of businesses to stay in business because they patronize them. If less women are working, they would have little or no money to spend. Hence, the overall economic contributions to the growth of small businesses in the area would be little. But there is more!

Women also constitute a large sector of the economy that are highly skilled and talented. There are more women that have passed through higher levels of education and possess both technical skills and certification needed to hold down a good job. What happens when these highly qualified women are prevented from gaining good employment? The talents waste and skills that should contribute to the growth of the economy are left under-utilized.

In order for all sectors of the economy to benefit fully from women who are professionals in their field or just naturally talented, we need to get more of them into the workforce. This way, various sectors of the economy would tap into the full potentials of these women population.

Unfortunately, gender employment gap remains a huge issue even in some advanced economies. Getting to the root of this issue is relevant to the growth and progress of many economies.

Identifying trends that create gender gaps

So the World Employment Outlook for 2024 has already presented some data to help better understand this issue of gender employment gap. We will highlight two key parts of the metrics in that publication. This would help answer the question - Why less Women work.

• More women are tied down by family responsibilities: In most families, women play a key role in home management. Along this comes with so much work and time-consuming tasks. That includes preparing the family dishes, taking care of kids (if any). Caring for sick and extended members of the family such as grandparents, etc. Women are supposed to do laundry, keep the home clean and tidy, and a host of other tasks.

The amount of work that women do at home are endless. These tasks consume large amount of time that should otherwise be spent in some form of formal employment. It is important to note that these house chores do not pay any form of salaries or wages to the women. They end up using a big chunk of their time in running the household for no pay. This thus limits the time remaining for them to hold down any regular jobs. It is therefore not surprising to see key data from the report identify household duties as a key reason why less women work.

It must be highlighted that family responsibilities explain a large share of the observed gender employment gap across all income groups. In low income countries, the estimated effect of family responsibilities accounts for 62 percent of the gender employment gap. In high-income countries this share reaches 80 per cent and it is close to 76 per cent in middle income countries. source

From the note above, one could easily observe that family responsibilities hold women down across all economies. Even advanced countries face the same issue. The early days of childbearing are the worst periods where it is very difficult for a women to hold down a regular job. Check the chat below extracted from the ILO report.

source

• Gender discrimination at work: There are less job opportunities for men than women. That is another stark finding from the report. In many sectors, men have a higher chance of getting hired than women. Even in sectors that should have more female presence, the reality on ground is not positive.

To show the difficulties that women face when trying to get a role, the report observes key discrepancies in the income or remuneration in the work space. Men often earn better than women in the same roles. This is not as a result of having inferior career qualifications or intellect than men. The main issue is that they are being gender recriminated against.

With the poor remuneration, most women are simply faced with two unfortunate realities. They either accept to work more for less or loose the opportunity entirely to men. This is another core reason why less women occupy good positions in many organizations. Men simply seem to rule the world. Below is data from the report that sampled the income of working women compared to men.

We find that employed women earn 73 cents to the dollar compared to employed men in high income countries. In low-income countries, women earn just 44 cents to the dollar. This reflects severe deficits in employment quality for women, who are overrepresented in vulnerable jobs. source

Conclusion

The solution to this problem could start from home. Men may need to spend more time to help out with house chores. This will not only relieve the women, but also give them more time to spend in formal work. Again, employers in both public and private sector could do more than for women. They should fight gender discrimination by offering women not just equal employment opportunities, but also a good working condition if hired. Maybe government policies could also help to get more women opportunities to be represented more in the labor market.

What do you think?

Reference

• World Employment and Social Outlook: May 2024 Update

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