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Gender Gaps in Unemployment Rates in OECD Countries

Author

Listed:
  • Ghazala Azmat
  • Maia Güell
  • Alan Manning
Abstract
There is an enormous literature on gender gaps in pay and labour market participation but virtually noliterature on gender gaps in unemployment rates. Although there are some countries in which there isessentially no gender gap in unemployment, there are others in which the female unemployment rate issubstantially above the male. Although it is easy to give plausible reasons for why more women than menmay decide not to want work, it is not so obvious why, once they have decided they want a job, women insome countries are less likely to be in employment than men. This is the subject of this paper. We showthat, in countries where there is a large gender gap in unemployment rates, there is a gender gap in bothflows from employment into unemployment and from unemployment into employment. We investigatedifferent hypotheses about the sources of these gaps. Most hypotheses find little support in the data and thegender gap in unemployment rates (like the gender gap in pay) remains largely unexplained. But it doesseem to correlate with attitudes on whether men are more deserving of work than women so thatdiscrimination against women may explain part of the gender gap in unemployment rates in theMediterranean countries.

Suggested Citation

  • Ghazala Azmat & Maia Güell & Alan Manning, 2004. "Gender Gaps in Unemployment Rates in OECD Countries," CEP Discussion Papers dp0607, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
    • Handle: RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp0607
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    References listed on IDEAS

    as
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Gender Gap; Unemployment Rates;

    JEL classification:

    • J16 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
    • J64 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Unemployment: Models, Duration, Incidence, and Job Search

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