The Great Depression was good for women?s employment. In the UK, 7.25m women were employed by 1943, 38% more than before World War II. And this increased employment was by no means in the ?traditional? spheres alone. For example, women made up 40% of the country?s engineering workforce by 1944. In the US, during the 1930s, the proportion of women in the wage labour force grew from 20% to 33% and beyond in some areas. All the new women workers did not welcome being relocated from their kitchens to the manufacturing plants, food queues or blackouts. But, thanks to the war coinciding with the downturn, the shift in favour of women?s employment was clear-cut.
In contrast, the current economic crisis is throwing up mixed signals. In some countries, women look set to overtake men in the workforce. Canada is one such country, where men were associated with nearly two-thirds of January?s job losses. In the US, January figures not only show a smaller share of men entering or re-entering the labour market to find a job, but the only employment bright spots (education and health services added 54,000 jobs) were those overwhelmingly ?manned? by women. But in the UK, female redundancy rate increased at double the pace of the male rate last year. Overall, women workers are faring better across the developed economies and the EU, as noted by the ILO report on global employment trends for women released last week. In 2008, male unemployment rate across the region increased by 1.1 percentage points over 2007 as opposed to an increase of 0.8 percentage points for women.
The rest of the world presents a diametric contrast. The ILO reports that the impact of the crisis in terms of unemployment rates will continue to be unfavourable for women across South Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.
As for India, where we are not in the habit of collecting sex disaggregated labour data, let?s see what we can extrapolate from the ministry of labour?s recent survey on the effects of the slowdown, which shows an employment decline of around 500,000 during October- December 2008. As ILO?s Sandra Rothboeck says, unpacking these findings indicates that casual employment has been almost four times harder hit by retrenchment. Manual employment is also more affected. This would mean that women, who tend to have more insecure employment and are at the lowest level of the labour hierarchy, are likely more affected. Making similar extrapolations for China, where the export slowdown has contributed to 20m internal migrants losing their jobs last year, the current crisis is hitting women harder because they are employed in higher proportions in the export sector.
Then there is the continuing gender pay gap. In the European Union, which embraced equal pay for equal work 50 years ago, gross hourly wages for men continued to be 17.4% higher than for women in 2007. Zooming in on the UK, even the civil service pay gap stands at 14%. The minister for women and equality has reported that the gap in the City of London is 44%, in contrast to the national average of 23%. Only 5% of City managing directors are women, even though there is a battery of stats supporting their performance, like companies with a female chief executive or board director achieving a 10% higher return or US companies with the most female board directors achieving a 53% higher return on equity. These are the type of numbers lending rational weight to questions like, what if Lehman Brothers had been Lehman Sisters?
Although it?s clear that the financial din that caused the current crisis was composed mostly by men, what?s less clear is whether women?s greater participation (and presumably different approaches to risk) would have created a different scenario. Countries like Iceland and Norway, having appointed a new female PM and 40% women on company boards, are testing such theories and we will will have to await the results.
Meanwhile, what?s obvious is that this is not an equal opportunity recession. The global employment-to-population rate for the female adult population may have increased by 1.2 percentage points between 1998 and 2008, as opposed to a decrease by 1.1 percentage points for male adults, but there is a sharp trend divide between developed and developing economies.
?renuka.bisht@expressindia.com
