Gender Unemployment Dynamics: Evidence from Ten Advanced Economies

Abstract

The paper investigates gender unemployment dynamics in 10 advances economies applying a recent methodology on widely available Labour Force Surveys data. We calculate the job finding and separation rates for each gender and use them to construct the steady-state unemployment gap as well as two counterfactual gender unemployment gaps: one generated by differences only in job finding rates and the other by differences only in separation rates. We find that in all countries the gender unemployment gap attributed to differences in the job finding rate is lower than the gap attributed to differences in the separation rate, suggesting that gender differences in the separation rate are the major factor behind the gender unemployment gap.