PREM Note 128 Economic Participation Girls Women.indd

The challenge of lagging employment rates for young women The rapid progress of many countries toward gender equality in education has been welldocumented. Of 106 countries, 83 achieved the Millennium Development target of parity in primary and secondary education by 2005; only 19 countries, most in sub-Saharan Africa, are off track to meet the target of gender equality in primary and secondary school enrollment by 2015. While the progress on meeting targets for gender equality in education is laudable, in many countries it is not being followed up by successful schoolto-work transitions. Of particular concern are adolescents and young adults who neither work nor study (henceforth referred to as “inactive”). Across all world regions (see figure 1), young women aged 20–24 have significantly higher rates of inactivity than young men. The gaps between young women and young men are substantial. In South Asia, the region with the largest gap, 64 percent of young women neither work nor study, while only 5 percent of young men are inactive. Latin America is another region with a large gap: 34 percent for young women and only 7 percent for young men. The statistics on inactivity do not include individuals who work without pay in familyowned businesses or who are self-employed, but they do include those—mostly young women—who perform domestic tasks within the household. The argument is not that all inactive young women should enter the labor market in order to maximize growth and accelerate poverty reduction. For some inactive young women, the welfare-maximizing choice may be to return to school or to continue performing household tasks. The critical question, of course, is who in the household is doing the maximization. Amartya Sen has noted that it may be difficult to formulate a clear notion of “individual welfare” in societies in which family identity is very strong. Even in such societies, he argues that it is reasonable to conceptualize an individual’s well-being in terms of his or her functionings and capabilities—that is, “what he or she is able to do or be” (Sen, 1990). Andrew Morrison and Shwetlena Sabarwal, PRMGE