Gender Gaps in Unemployment Rates in OECD Countries

Ghazala Azmat, Maia Güell () and Alan Manning

CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

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.

Keywords: Gender Gap; Unemployment Rates (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J16 J64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (33)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Gender Gaps in Unemployment Rates in OECD Countries (2015)
Working Paper: Gender Gaps in Unemployment Rates in OECD Countries (2004)
Working Paper: Gender gaps in unemployment rates in OECD countries (2004)
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