Despite women breaking barriers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) occupations and some overcoming obstacles in leadership roles, the transformation of the gender landscape in the workplace remains somewhat limited. Explore the latest insights from the new ILO database Worker and Sector Profiles.
Despite some progress, gender wage gaps persist and are even widening in some occupations. Gender wage gaps are not primarily attributable to differences in educational attainment, and in general do not narrow but rather often increase with age.
May marks both International Day of the Midwife and International Nurses Day – two groups of workers that play essential roles in any healthcare system. However, both professions – which are dominated by women – are characterised by long hours and low pay. So, what can be done to improve working conditions and help nurses and midwives deliver the best quality care to patients?
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a set of 17 global goals to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure prosperity for all. But with the COVID-19 pandemic upending the global labour market in recent years, progress towards achieving these goals has been disrupted. From rising unemployment and informal work to slowing productivity growth and persistent gender inequalities, the pandemic has highlighted the need for urgent action to build a more resilient and equitable world of work.
A new indicator developed by the ILO finds that women’s access to employment, working conditions and pay gap have barely improved in the past two decades.
Generating high quality statistics relies on eliminating gender bias at all stages of the production process. This blog looks at how gender bias occurs in statistics and what the ILO is doing to support efforts to minimize it.
The pandemic wreaked havoc on people’s lives and societies, but how far did it set the global community back in reaching the SDG targets related to decent work and economic growth?
Released today, new global data covering 189 countries and territories expose the motherhood penalty faced by millions of women around the world in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
How many men and women were employed last week? How many hours did they work in their main jobs? And how many hours did they work in unpaid activities such as caring for children? These are seemingly straightforward questions but measuring paid and unpaid work through household surveys is anything but straightforward. This holds true especially for women in developing countries, who are more often engaged in informal activities such as microenterprises or small-scale farming — activities that can fall through the cracks of traditional surveys.
This report presents the findings of the ILO-World Bank study in Sri Lanka. It shows the key areas of inconsistency discovered between the labour force survey and multi-topic living standards survey, how those inconsistencies were addressed across a range of topics including the measurement of employment, labour underutilization and own-use production work. In addition, the report highlights the range of valuable data that can be generated when the 19th ICLS standards are applied through household surveys.
