OECD Observer
Hot issues » Gender
  • New times, old perspectives?

    The long road towards gender equality has arrived at greater educational attainment, higher female labour force participation, and advances in politics and business, but we haven’t reached the end yet. 

    (387 words)
  • Protecting women's work

    Half the world’s workforce, 1.5 billion working women and men, are in vulnerable employment. The global economic crisis has swelled the ranks of those whose jobs do not provide enough to meet basic needs, the “working poor”, by more than 100 million people, mainly women.

    (981 words)
  • ©Luke MacGregor/Reuters

    The gender dividend: an urgent economic imperative

    The corporate world is far from making the most out of gender diversity in the workplace. But some businesses are finding innovative ways to change this. 

    (1016 words)
  • Cherie Blair

    Cherie Blair ©OECD

    Women and entrepreneurship

    Discrimination against women hurts everyone. As Founder of the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women Cherie Blair explains, women entrepreneurs are an economic resource that economies, rich and poor alike, can ill afford to overlook.

    (849 words)
  • Acting on gender


    ©OECD

    (110 words)
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    Jobs with small children

    Most people would probably agree that female employment and maternity leave are related issues. But did you know that female employment rates are not always highest in countries where paid maternity leave is longest?

    (211 words)
  • Gender’s development dimension

    Could action on gender help jumpstart efforts to make the Millennium Development Goals deadline by 2015? The third goal already explicitly aims to “promote gender equality and empower women” (MDG3), but gender has a direct and profound impact on several other targets, too.

    (234 words)
  • Wanted: Women scientists

    It is a century since Marie Curie won two Nobel prizes, one for physics and the other for chemistry. How can more women be encouraged to work in science?

    (623 words)
  • Mancession?

    Job market: a gender approach.

    (233 words)
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    Mind the gap

    More women go to work today than 40 years ago, but their pay has not kept pace with men’s. Some 58% of women on average in the OECD area worked in 2008, up from 45% in 1970, ranging from 70% of women in the Nordic countries to less than 50% in Greece, Italy, Mexico and Turkey. Indeed, with fewer women staying at home, dual-earner families are now commonplace in most OECD countries; only in Japan, Mexico and Turkey are single-income families more common. However, men are often still the main earners in dual-earner families because so many women work part-time and for lower wages than their husbands. In the Netherlands, a relatively egalitarian country, 60% of women work part time, compared with 16% of men.

    (223 words)
  • Putting women in their right place

    Has gender equality improved since International Women’s Day was first launched a century ago? The answers heard during this year’s global events on 8 March were mixed. Yes, progress has been made, but discrimination continues everywhere, which not only harms women but holds back society’s potential too.

    (370 words)
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