Publication - Reducing Europe’s gender employment gap
On the occasion of International Women's Day, Eurofound Senior Research Manager Massimiliano Mascherini looks at the impact of the gender employment gap on Europe.
One of the common values that unites the European Union is that of equal opportunities: all citizens should have the same possibility to improve their lives and participate in the labour market regardless of gender, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation.
Ensuring equal opportunities in finding work also represents a key goal for Europe in facing the challenges posed by demographic change and achieving inclusive and sustainable growth.
Yet, for all the fine words, opportunities remain far from being equal and half of the population still seems to be held back from fulfilling their talents and reaching their goals.
Despite significant progress in reducing gender inequalities in the labour market over recent decades, gaps between men and women in employment rates still persist along with a consistent over-representation of women in low-paid sectors, part-time and temporary jobs. And while a long-term convergence in employment opportunities seems to be under way – setting aside for now their quality and conditions – recent improvements have been mainly driven by a relative worsening of the male employment rate. This in turn has come thanks to substantial job losses in male-dominated sectors during the economic crisis.
Recent data show that the gender employment gap, defined by Eurostat as the difference between the employment rates of men and women aged 20-64, stood at 10.4 percentage points in 2015: that of women being only 60.4% against 70.8% for men. To put it in concrete terms, this differential corresponds to 17 million women, which is roughly the entire population of, say, the Netherlands. Yet average figures mask a great heterogeneity among EU countries: Italy, Greece and Malta are amongst the worst performers while Scandinavian and Baltic countries provide more gender-balanced employment opportunities (see Figure 1). In Germany, the gender employment gap was around 8%, below the EU-28 average but well above Finland (1.5%), the country with the lowest gap in female employment participation. This picture not only presents differences in the structure of the labour market and composition of the labour force, but also reflects the diversity in terms of national institutional set-ups, policy regimes and cultural values – all known to have significant effects on women’s participation in the labour market.
page source https://www.eurofound.europa.eu/news/
