Looking at employment from a gender perspective

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Looking at employment from a gender perspective

• Angela Me
• Chief Social and Demographic Statistics
• UNECE Statistical Division

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Understanding the Labour Markets Example UK
Source Labour Force Survey, spring 2005, Office
for National Statistics, UK
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Understanding the Labour Markets Example UK
Source Labour Force Survey, spring 2005, Office
for National Statistics, UK
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Source Labour Force Survey, spring 2005, Office
for National Statistics, UK
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Understanding the Labour Markets Example
Germany
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Source A pilot project on the demography of
small and medium sized enterprises (DOSME) for
Central European countries (CECs)
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Three-Year Survival Rate of New Businesses from
1998, by Sex of Entrepreneur ()
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(No Transcript)
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Informal Employment

• What does informal mean?
• The informal economy refers to all economic
  activities by workers and economic units that are
  not covered or insufficiently covered by formal
  arrangements
• Informal sector enterprises
• Unincorporated enterprises enterprises owned by
  individuals or households that are not
  constituted as separated legal entities
  independently of their owners, and for which no
  complete accounts are available that would
  permit a financial separation of the production
  activities of the enterprise from the other
  activities of its owner
• Size is below a certain threshold (five
  employees?)
• All or at least some of the goods or services
  produced are meant for sale or barter. Market
  orientation
• Defined by national circumstances
• Lack of registration
• Enterprises engaged in agriculture could be
  included but good to identified them separately
  from the non-agriculture enterprises

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Informal Employment

• Howinformal relate to employment?
• There are two informal concepts that affect
  employment
• Employment in the informal sector
• Informal employment

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Informal Employment

• How doesinformal relate to employment?
• Employment in the informal sector
• all persons who, during a given reference
  period, were employed in at least one of the
  informal sector enterprise, irrespective of their
  status in employment and whether it was their
  main or a secondary job
•  

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Informal Employment

• How doesinformal relate to employment?
• Informal Employment
• Persons employed in the informal sector persons
  employed in informal jobs.
• Informal jobs
• non-standard, atypical, irregular, precarious,
  unprotected
• not covered by existing regulations (social
  protection, benefits
• The first criterion is based on the production
  unit, the second criterion on the type of job

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Informal Employment
Total Employment
Informal employment
Informal jobs in formal enterprises and households
Employment in the informal sector
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An example Moldova 2003
Informal Employment
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Informal employment and status in employment in
Moldova 2003
Informal Employment
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Informal Employment

• Gender and informal employment
• Informal employment comprises one half to
  three-quarters of non-agricultural employment in
  developing countries.
• Data disaggregated by informal and formal
  employment and employment status provide new
  information on the difference in the
  opportunities of women and men in the labor
  market
• Informal employment is generally a larger source
  of employment for women than formal employment
• In most developing countries it is a larger
  source of employment for women than for men
• Women are concentrated in the more precarious
  types of informal employment
• Average earnings from these types of informal
  employment are low

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Informal Employment
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Informal Employment
Share of formal and informal employment by sex
and industry, Moldova 2003
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Source UNECE Gender Database
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Gender Pay Gap

• Gender Pay Gap
• What is it?
• Average difference between men and women earnings
  
• Average difference of what men and women take out
  of employment in monetary terms

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Gender Pay Gap

• Gender Pay Gap
• What is it?
• (average men earnings average women
  earnings)/average men earnings
• It is not the of women earnings compared with
  men earnings (IT IS A GAP)

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Gender Pay Gap

• Gender Pay Gap
• It is the average difference of what earnings?
• Yearly?
• Monthly?
• Hourly?
• It depends

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Gender Pay Gap

• Gender Pay Gap
• It is the average difference of what earnings?
• Only waged-employment?
• Include self-employment?
• It should include self-employment, but de-facto
  it rarely does

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Gender Pay Gap

• Gender Pay Gap
• Why do we use it?
• What is that we are trying to measure?

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Gender Pay Gap

• What is that we are trying to measure?
• Discrimination in employment?
• Segregation in the labour market?
• No, Gender Pay Gap is a simple general aggregated
  measure of different participation in employment

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Gender Pay Gap

• What is that we are trying to measure?
• GPG is like life expectancy, it is an outcome
  indicator and does not explain why the difference
  exist

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Gender Pay Gap

• What is that we are trying to measure?
• Some people criticize GPG because they say that
  the difference in earnings does not reveal a
  discrimination, GPS is due to the fact that women
  work less hours than men
• GPG does not measure discrimination, it only
  reveals that there is a different out-take
  between women and men in employment
• other studies related for example to
  segregation, participation, and discrimination
  can explain this difference
• GPG does not measure if women and men have the
  same earnings for the same job

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Gender Pay Gap

• What is that we are trying to measure?
• There are attempts to adjust GPG to better
  measure discrimination
• taking the average difference by occupation for
  example
• this reduces the GPG, but an adjusted GPG will
  never measure only discrimination

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Gender Pay Gap

• What is that we are trying to measure?
• GPG based on hourly earnings eliminates the
  effect of part-time jobs for example
• Is this useful?
• It depends..

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Segregation

• Horizontal Segregation
• There is no hierarchical order in the different
  categories
• Vertical Segregation
• There is a hierarchical order (salary, power,
  prestige, )

Inequality
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Understanding the Labour Markets Example
Norway, 2004
Graph 1 Percentage of women and men among
managers
Graph 2 Percentage of women and men among
persons employed in the public sector
Graph 3 Percentage of women and men among
managers in the public and private sectors
Graph 4 Percentage of female employees in
managerial positions in the public and private
sectors
Source Women and Men in Norway, Statistics
Norway, 2006
Women Men
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Relevance for SPECA countries

• What indicators can measure the reconciliation
  between family and work?
• Employment by number of children
• Employment by age of youngest child
• Part-time job by number of children
• Relatively easy to accommodate in National
  Statistical Systems (NSS)
• What indicators can analyze SME from a gender
  perspective?
• Definition of entrepreneur
• SME by sex of founder (owner or founder?)
• Motivations to start a business by sex of founder
• Success of business by sex of founder
• More efforts needed from the NSS

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Relevance for SPECA countries

• What informal concept is important for gender
  analysis?
• Informal employment, persons working in informal
  sector?
• Persons in informal employment by sex, industry,
  status in employment, .
• More efforts needed from the NSS
• What gender pay gap is relevant?
• Hourly, monthly, annually?
• Adjusted?
• What source?
• Relatively easy to accommodate in National
  Statistical Systems (NSS)

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Relevance for SPECA countries

• What sort of vertical segregation is important to
  study?
• Percentage of managers to the total employed
  persons by sex, percentage of male and female
  among managers?
• Self-employed excluding agriculture?
• .
• Relatively easy to accommodate in National
  Statistical Systems (NSS)

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• A gender analysis of the labour market provides a
  better understanding of the labour market itself

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Thank you!