"Report reveals weak female labor-force participation in MENA region", 4 November 2024

The study, titled “Trade And Women in the Labor Market: How Different Is MENA from Other Regions?” pointed out that women in the Middle East and North Africa tend to work predominantly in paid work [...]

This reflects a high level of wage employment, significantly higher than the rate for women in sub-Saharan Africa (20.7%) and about 15 percentage points above the proportion of women in paid jobs in Latin America and the Caribbean (59.3 %)[...]

These negative effects of trade openness on female labor-force participation and wage employment [...]

“These findings raise concerns about the potentially adverse impacts that further structural change and trade-induced sectoral shifts may have on women’s labor-market outcomes”[...]

"Increased tertiary education may have led many women to raise their reservation wage (a supply-side factor), thus reducing the likelihood of them participating in wage employment, and eventually causing some women to leave the labor force”[...]

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