Unemployment rates for women in the OECD

Labour Market Trends, Sep 2004

WOMEN HAVE considerably higher unemployment rates than men in a number of OECD countries, according to a report funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. While the gap between unemployment rates for men and women was found to be small in some countries, in others it was very large. In the UK in 1999, the unemployment rate for women in the prime working age group (25-54) was 1 percentage point below that for men, while in Spain it was 12 percentage points above.

The report compares unemployment rates for men and women in OECD countries in 1999 using standard ILO definitions of unemployment. The largest gaps were found in Spain (where the rate for women was 12 percentage points higher than that for men); Greece (9 percentage points); Italy (6 percentage points); and France and the Czech Republic (both 4 percentage points).

The smallest gaps were found in Austria, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, where there was very little difference between male and female unemployment rates. Men had slightly higher unemployment rates than women in Norway and Turkey (0.4 per cent); Ireland (0.9 per cent); and Hungary and the UK (1.1 per cent).

Across the OECD the gap between the unemployment rates for men and women were largest among the young, the married and those with young children. In most countries unemployed women tended to be younger than unemployed men, and a higher proportion of both employed and unemployed women were divorced or separated than were equivalent men. In Spain, Greece, Ireland and Italy, for example, women tended to have higher education levels than men and lower levels of work experience. France, Belgium, the UK, the USA and the Netherlands did not have this same gap.

In all countries studied, people became unemployed mainly because they had lost a previous job they wanted to keep, rather than because they no longer wanted to do the job they had. Men were more likely than women to be made redundant in many of the OECD countries. The difference was greatest in the UK, where 45 per cent of men's jobs ended in redundancy, compared with 23 per cent for women.

Women from the Mediterranean countries were also more vulnerable than men to long-term unemployment. Higher proportions of women than men had been out of work for longer than a year in Greece (11 percentage points difference); Spain (10 percentage points); and Portugal and France (3 percentage points). However, in the majority of OECD countries, higher proportions of men than women had been unemployed for more than 12 months. In the UK and Japan the proportion of longterm unemployed among men was 13 percentage points higher than for women; in Ireland it was 12 percentage points higher and in Luxembourg 11 percentage points.

In most countries, women were less likely to receive welfare benefits than men. This may have been because their weaker employment history made them less likely to have established entitlement and because unemployed women may have been living with employed men and thus were not eligible for benefits. Among the unemployed in Spain, Ireland and the UK, twice the proportion of men to women were receiving benefits. In Italy, Germany and Finland, similar numbers of men and women were receiving benefits.

Women looking for work by Ghazala Azmat, Maria Guell and Alan Manning was published in 2004 by the Centre for Economic Performance. This is based at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and financed by the Economic and Social Research Council. The report was based on a discussion paper and can be downloaded from http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dpO6O7.pdf. For more information contact Ghazala Azmat, tel. 0207 955 6640, email g.y.azmat@lse.ac.uk.