Global crisis may render more women jobless

The global economic crisis is likely to push up the number of unemployed women to 22 million in 2009, the International Labour Office (ILO) has said in its annual Global Employment Trends for Women report (GET) that was released here today. it has warned that the global jobs crisis will become acute with the deepening of the recession in 2009.
At the same time, ILO also said that the global economic crisis would place new hurdles in the path towards sustainable and socially equitable growth, making decent employment opportunities for women increasingly meagre. ILO called for 'creative solutions' to address the gender gap.
It issued the Global Employment Trends for Women report in the run-up to this year*s annual International Women*s Day. 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 seven 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 to females than to males in most regions of the world and most clearly in Latin America and the Caribbean.
It added that the only regions where unemployment rates are expected to be less detrimental to women are East Asia, 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.
Labour market projections for 2009 show deterioration in global labour markets for both women and men. The ILO projected 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 seven 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, ILO also projected that the global vulnerable employment rate 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 was still greater for women, the crisis is pushing more men into vulnerable employment compared to 2007.