Gender Equality Issues in Labor Markets: Lessons for COVID-19 Era

Contributions of women to labor force participation and gender equality have been considered as one of the important aspects of economic growth. After decades-long struggles, many countries had ultimately accomplished some improvements in terms of gender equality in their labor markets. All this hard work makes sense if gender equality is protected. Unfortunately, the times of economic crisis may reverse the trend in a quick pace. The aim of this chapter was to show the severe negative impacts of the 2008 global crisis on female labor force, especially in some middle-income countries. The study of the effects of this earlier global crisis can provide us with some valuable lessons on how to ease negative consequences experienced by female labor force in the presence of severe economic and financial problems associated with the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. The dataset covers 187 countries from different regions of the world and from different income groups between 2008 and 2019. The findings of the probit regression analysis identify some country characteristics associated with improving gender equality, such as governance quality, access to financial markets by women, and higher female human capital index. During the times of economic crisis, governments tend to spend more money, but sometimes such spending may not target the groups in most needs. However, given that females in the labor market tend to be more negatively affected by economic problems, governments instead may target businesses by women or female workers and training of females to support gender equality in labor markets.