Promoting gender equality to strengthen economic growth and resilience

Christophe André, Orsetta Causa, Emilia Soldani, Douglas Sutherland and Filiz Unsal

No 1776, OECD Economics Department Working Papers from OECD Publishing

Abstract: Women’s employment rates and wages are still lagging those of men across OECD countries, with average employment and wage gaps now around 15% and 12% respectively. Gaps narrowed at a relatively modest pace over the past decade, calling for further policy action. A lack of affordable high-quality childcare is often an obstacle to women’s participation in the labour market and notably to working full time. A very unequal sharing of parental leave between parents and challenges upon return to work further hampers women’s careers. Biases in the tax system may discourage women from working in some countries. Women face disadvantage in accessing management positions and entrepreneurship. A range of policies can help reduce gender gaps, including better childcare provision, incentivising parents to better share parental leave, re-skilling and upskilling on return from parental leave, encouraging gender equality within firms, integration programmes for foreign-born women, promoting women entrepreneurship and financial inclusion, and levelling taxation for second earners. Moreover, the multiple dimensions and root causes of gender inequality call for mainstreaming gender across policy domains.

Keywords: Childcare; Economics of Gender; Education; Entrepreneurship; Financial inclusion; Gender equality; Immigration; Inequality; Labour discrimination; Parental leave; Taxation; Training (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 H24 I24 J13 J15 J16 J71 J78 L26 M53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-11-20
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ent, nep-fle, nep-gen and nep-lab
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