Employment and Non-Employment : A Gender Perspective

Women’s and men’s unemployment rates have converged over the last decades in France and the former even became slightly lower at the beginning of 2014. Does that mean that the issue of women’s access to employment no longer matters? This presentation will show that using exclusively the unemployment rate leads to hide strong differences that remain between women’s and men’s situations on the labour market. Distinguishing between eight situations, from full-time employment to inactivity and analysing them according to gender, age, educational level and family status, our analysis quantifies these remaining divergences. The econometric analysis confirms that, other things being equal, women are more likely to be unemployed or inactive and thus shows the persistent gender gap in terms of access to employment in spite of women’s increasing educational levels.