The labour market by gender

Work & training
The labour market by gender

The latest labour market figures published by Statbel show that since the third quarter of 2017, the unemployment rate of women is lower than that of men. At the same time, the employment rate is increasing faster for women than for men, reducing the gap between the two.

Which jobs by gender?

However, the type of work varies considerably by gender. While women account for 57 % of the public sector workers, only one self-employed out of three is a woman.

Women are mainly employed in the sectors of health care and social work, education and trade.

Women represent the majority of clerical support workers, service and sales workers, professionals and elementary occupations (domestic helps, etc.). However, they represent only a tiny proportion of craft and related trades workers, plant and machine operators, and assemblers, skilled agricultural workers or armed forces occupations. Finally, only one manager out of 3 is a woman.

But also...

53 % of employed women have a higher education degree, against 41 % of male workers.

Despite this, in 2017, a woman earned a gross hourly wage that was on average 6.0 % lower than a man's gross hourly wage. And yet, Belgium performs better than most of the other European countries in terms of pay gap between women and men. Within the EU, the gender pay gap amounts to 16.0 %.

All these figures are available in our scoreboard “The labour market by gender”.

 

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