A report released Friday by the International Labor Organization said women now account for 40.5 percent of the world’s work force, up from 39.9 percent a decade ago and the highest figure ever recorded by the U.N. agency.
Of the 2.8 billion workers in the world, 1.1 billion are women, said the report, issued ahead of International Women’s Day on Monday.
But women account for 60 percent of the world’s 550 million “working poor,” the study said, using 2003 figures.
Although women are slowly closing the worldwide employment gap, there are wide variations between regions.
In Europe’s former communist countries, 91 women are economically active for every 100 men. But in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, the figure is only 40 women for every 100 men.
The global growth in the number of female workers has not brought equal pay, however. In six occupations studied, women still earned less than their male co-workers, even in traditionally female-dominated occupations such as nursing and teaching, ILO said.
“In short, true equality in the world of work is still out of reach,” the agency said.
“Women continue to have more difficulty obtaining top jobs than they do lower down the hierarchy,” said Linda Wirth, head of ILO’s gender bureau.
“A handful of women are making headlines here and there as they break through, but statistically they represent a mere few percent of top management jobs.
“The rule of thumb is still: the higher up an organization’s hierarchy, the fewer the women.”
Read, as they say, as Amp would say, the whole thing..
The percentage of women who are workers is most likely considerable more than 40%. The official statistics can’t capture much of the work that women actually do in many poorer countries. The informal markets are not included in the statistics, and they have disproportionately more woman workers.
That men earn more in traditionally female-dominated fields such as nursing is an interesting bit of evidence that most right-wing theories of why women earn less can’t effectively explain.
“rule of thumb”?