Economic crisis could hit jobs of over 22m women this year -ILO

The economic crisis is expected to increase the number of unemployed women by up to 22 million in 2009, the International Labour Office (ILO) said in its annual Global Employment Trends for Women report and added that the global jobs crisis is expected to worsen sharply with the deepening of the recession in 2009.

At the same time, the ILO also said that the global economic crisis would place new hurdles in the path toward sustainable and socially equitable growth making decent work for women increasingly more difficult, and called for "creative solutions" to address the gender gap.

The ILO issued the Global Employment Trends for Women in the run up to this year's annual International Women's Day, which is to be marked today at the ILO in Geneva.

The Global Employment Trends report indicates that of the three billion people employed around the world in 2008, 1.2 billion were women (40.4 per cent). It said that in 2009, the global unemployment rate for women could reach 7.4 per cent, compared to 7.0 per cent for men.

The report said that the gender impact of the economic crisis in terms of unemployment rates is expected to be more detrimental for females than for males in most regions of the world and most clearly in Latin America and the Caribbean.

It said that the only regions where unemployment rates are expected to be less detrimental for women are East Asia, the developed economies and the non- EU South Eastern Europe and CIS which had narrower gender gaps in terms of job opportunities prior to the current economic crisis.

The labour market projections for 2009 show deterioration in global labour markets for women and men. The ILO projects that the global unemployment rate could reach between 6.3 per cent and 7.1 per cent, with a corresponding female unemployment rate ranging from 6.5 to 7.4 per cent (compared to 6.1 per cent to 7.0 per cent for men).

This would result in an increase of between 24 million and 52 million people unemployed worldwide of which from 10 million to 22 million would be women.

At the same time, the ILO also projects that the global vulnerable employment rate 2 would range from 50.5 to 54.7 per cent for women in 2009, and 47.2 and 51.8 per cent for men, indicating that while the burden of vulnerability is still greater for women, the crisis is pushing more men into vulnerable employment compared to 2007.

"Women's lower employment rates, weaker control over property and resources, concentration in informal and vulnerable forms of employment with lower earnings, and less social protection, all place women in a weaker position than men to weather crises", said ILO Bureau for Gender Equality Director Jane Hodges.