UNEMPLOYMENT AMONG WOMEN TO RISE DUE TO ECONOMIC CRISIS

BANGKOK, March 6 (Bernama) -- The economic crisis is expected to increase
the number of unemployed women by up to 22 million this year as the global job
crisis is likely to worsen sharply with the deepening of the recession in 2009,
the International Labour Office (ILO) said in its latest report.

The ILO, in its annual Global Employment Trends for Women report (GET)
released today, said the global economic crisis would place new hurdles in the
path toward sustainable and socially equitable growth making decent work for
women increasingly more difficult, and called for "creative solutions" to
address the gender gap.

ILO Bureau for Gender Equality Director Jane Hodges said women's lower
employment rates, weaker control over property and resources, concentration in
informal and vulnerable forms of employment with lower earnings, and less
social protection, all place women in a weaker position than men to weather
crises.

The GET report indicates that of the three billion people employed around
the world in 2008, 1.2 billion were women (40.4 percent) and in 2009, the
global unemployment rate for women could reach 7.4 per cent, compared with 7.0
per cent for men.

The report says that the gender impact of the economic crisis in terms of
unemployment rates is expected to be more detrimental for females than for
males in most regions of the world and most clearly in Latin America and the
Caribbean.



It adds that the only regions where unemployment rates are expected to be
less detrimental for women are East Asia, the 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.

The labour market projections for 2009 show a deterioration in global labour
markets for both women and men.

The ILO projects 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 with 6.1 per cent to 7.0 per cent for men).

This would result in an increase of between 24 million and 52 million people
unemployed worldwide, of which 10 million to 22 million would be women.

At the same time, the ILO also projects that the global vulnerable
employment rate would range from 50.5 to 54.7 per cent for women in 2009, and
47.2 to 51.8 percent for men, indicating that while the burden of vulnerability
is still greater for women, the crisis is pushing more men into vulnerable
employment compared with 2007.

In a statement issued for International Women's Day, ILO Director-General
Juan Somavia said that in times of economic upheaval, women often experience the
negative consequences more rapidly and are slower to enjoy the benefits of
recovery.

-- BERNAMA