Educated and unemployed: For young women in developing countries, global crisis is personal

17 August 2010 [MediaGlobal]: In the latest report on “Global Trends of Youth Employment,” the International Labor Organization (ILO) found evidence of an increasing gender disparity in unemployment rates in developing countries. The agency expresses concern that policies against gender discrimination are being neglected in efforts to encourage the global economic recovery.

Released last Thursday at the launch of the United Nation’s International Year of Youth, the ILO report found that youth unemployment has reached historic records with over 81 million young people between the ages 18-25 unemployed globally.
The economic crisis has hit young women in developing countries particularly hard.

The ILO found that not only do young women continue to have a harder time finding work than their male counterparts, but since the start of the crisis, their chances of employment has significantly decreased.

In an interview with MediaGlobal, Gianni Rosas, Coordinator of the ILO’s Programme on Youth Employment, said that in developing countries, “Young women in most regions have become even more likely to be unemployed than young men.”

The unemployment numbers from the ILO report imply that the economic crisis had served to exacerbate gender inequity in areas where it existed before. The organization presents its reports on youth employment every two years and Rosas says last year’s numbers show worsening conditions for young women in the world’s poorest countries.

The developing world has long struggled with gender equity in its employment, with women jobless trailing behind that of males. “By 2009, the gap had increased even further to 7.3 percentage points in Latin America & the Caribbean, 10.5 points in the Middle East, and 11.4 points in North Africa,” said Rosas.

With the gender gap in unemployment numbers increasing in the developing world, the ILO is warning that policies guarding against gender discrimination were being increasingly ignored in the response to the economic crisis.

“Clearly, what is happening in these regions is that where job markets were already highly competitive for youth, as the market becomes even more difficult during the economic crisis, young women are pushed even further to the back of the queue,” said Rosas.

Prior to the crises, women were actually more likely than their male counterparts to receive new jobs. The ILO’s report shows that in the developing economies and the European Union, the increase in the male youth unemployment rate during 2007- 2009 was 6.8 percentage points, compared to 3.9 points for young women.

According to Rosas, “The negative gap has increased during the crisis years as young men increase their probability of being unemployed vis-à-vis young women.”

The gender gaps in the developing world have been attributed to various factors. In many Middle Eastern and North African countries, the reliance on labor-based markets has long put women at a disadvantage for employment. There, participation rates for women have always been low, 21.5 and 22.9 percent in the respective regions.

While educational advancements in developed nations often translate into greater employment opportunity in developed nations, for young women in the world’s developing countries, the same does not hold consistently true.

The ILO report states that “Despite education gains, the labour force participation rate of young women in the Middle East increased by less than 2 percentage points between 1998 and 2008, while in North Africa the rates actually decreased from 25.2 to 22.9 per cent.”

Rosas noted that as the unemployment of young educated women in developing nations increased so did the likelihood that they would leave their countries. This often results in what is known as the brain drain.

The “brain drain” phenomenon has become a major source of concern for governments in various developing countries, who are seeing much of their own workforce leaving for developing nations and better opportunities. In the Caribbean, the emigration of nurses has become an increasingly urgent issue. The mass exodus of thousands of young and primarily female nurses leaves many countries in the region without an adequate healthcare workforce.

The mixed picture seems to suggest that unemployment in developing countries could not simply be avoided through the pursuit of education, a dismal reality considering the international emphasis put on education for women and girls as part of the Millennium Development Goals.