Women’s Employment and Public Spending: A Cross-Country Study

The relationships between public spending, employment, and growth are already complex and yet this complexity increases when considering employment disaggregated by gender. This paper analyzes the effects that public spending on social infrastructure (healthcare and education) has on women’s relative employment using a panel dataset of 138 countries from 1995 to 2011. The panel data consisted of publicly-available data from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators, the Educational Attainment Dataset, the International Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook Database, and the World Governance Indicators. Employment was estimated under three separate specifications (the female employment rate, the male employment rate, and a measure of gender equality in employment) which were included in a three-stage least squares simultaneous equation estimation. The results indicate that both categories of social infrastructure spending are positively related to women’s relative employment. Furthermore, the process of industrialization, the size of the population, and trade are all negatively related to women’s relative employment. This paper has significant social and practical implications for gender-sensitive public policy discussions by providing empirical evidence in support of healthcare and education.