FEMALE EMPLOYMENT AROUND THE WORLD

Over the past three decades, the number of female wage and salaried workers has significantly increased across the world.

According to the World Bank, wage and salaried workers are individuals with “paid employment jobs” with explicit, written or oral, or implicit employment contract that give them salaries not dependent on the revenue of the unit for which they work. A high number of wage and salaried workers in a country can signify economic development.

Since 1991, the International Labor Organization has been collecting data on the percentage of female and male wage and salaried workers around the world. The data is drawn from labor force surveys and household surveys.

This project looks at female and male employment across the world, breaking down the relationship between the two and highlighting the change in female employment over the past 29 years.

This animated chart compares the female and male employment in each country over the past three decades. The trend line highlights which countries have more working women and which have more working men.

Countries are divided into seven regions: East Asia and Pacific, Europe and Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, Middle East and North Africa, North America, South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. You can also filter them based on their income group: high income, low income, lower middle income and upper middle income.

The ratio between female and male employment has also significantly changed in all countries. This is another animated chart that highlights this change since 1991.

The chart only shows countries with a ratio of 1 or above, which are countries where male employment remained higher. The higher the country is on a chart, the bigger the gap between male and female employment is in the country.

This project was created by Deena Sabry for the Data Visualization class at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.