Female Participation Rate In Labor Force
Female are half of our society. Without the development of women, a society will find it hard to thrive. However, still lot societies are undervaluing the contribution of women.
I came from Bangladesh, a country in South Asia. There are a lot of cases of discrimination in that part. In different parts of the world, male-dominated society is very prevalent. Funny thing is, even in 1st world countries like US and Europe has some sort of discrimination against women. Even though there are lot of rights for women in US, the wage gap is still very much existent. In my first picture, I have presented a graph which shows the wage difference between men and women in different countries in EU. The gap ranges from 30% to 4.9 %. Even in different countries in Europe, the gap fluctuates a lot. Imagine what that gap might be in countries where women have fewer rights and less working opportunities.
Next point that I want to talk about is women participation in labor force. I have included a link from World Bank which includes these particular sets of data from different countries. Surprisingly, women from some poorer countries are participating in work more than the developed countries. One more surprising fact is, women in some Middle Eastern countries and South Asian countries have the least amount of participation in work force. Some countries encourage women to care more about household chores rather than participating in work outside. I think this sort of mentality is very deterrent for the economic growth of a particular country. Some rich countries also have a much less participation rate in comparison to some Sub-Saharan African countries. I would say economic solvency is the issue in this case. 52% of the women aged more than 15 are participating in work.
I wanted to say that women need more empowerment and we can achieve that by providing good amount rights and work opportunities to them. In that way, a country could be benefited as well as those women whose role was previously confined inside four walls.
This topic is very interesting. As discussed in class, I feel that eventually this will not be an issue. Because women are the majority in higher education and are integrating with the corporate world, I think in 20 years this will be equal. Women will have the same seniority as the men in the same workplace and it will be easy for a man and a women to have the same salary. Right now it is hard to dispute the differences in salaries and opportunities. A lot of the times men have more seniority because 2 decades ago men were the majority in the workplace. Those men today are the CEO’s of companies.
I think this topic can be of greater dispute, if in twenty years there are still salary and position differences. Until then, I do believe there are some situations where a women won’t be chosen or a men won’t be chosen for a position because it is not “socially acceptable,” for example I think that a job like a garbage man would be difficult to obtain for a woman. With the word man in the title it is already implied that the job is geared towards men. The same situation applies for a secretary position. It is still difficult for a man to get a secretary position. Yes I do think the government should get involved eventually to make sure that these opportunities are equal. But for now a lot of things are changing. We should give it a chance to change.