Employment losses due to the COVID-19 pandemic have been significantly worse for women than for men, unlike other recessions in recent history which have tended to affect male workers relatively more than female workers.¹

At the peak of the pandemic in Q2 of 2020, men's working hours declined by 18.8% while women's working hours declined by 18.1%. However, since then women have suffered a significantly higher loss of working hours than men have globally, as shown in Figure 2.1,

A time-series analysis of gender parity in labour-force participation for a constant sample of 102 countries included in every edition since the inception of the Gender Gap Index shows that global gender parity for labour-force participation had been slowly declining since 2009. The trend however was exacerbated in 2020, when gender parity scores decreased precipitously over two consecutive editions. As a result, in 2022, gender parity stands at 62.9%, the lowest score registered since the Index was first compiled (Figure 2.2).

At a regional level, gender parity in labour-force participation had been evolving on different trajectories since 2013, before dropping markedly in 2021. As can be observed from Figure 2.3, a negative trend is clearer in South Asia as well as Middle East and North Africa, where gender parity in labour-force participation has been declining at a faster pace than in other regions since 2013. In contrast, Sub-Saharan Africa, North America and Europe has seen gender parity in labour-force participation moderately improving, or steadily holding, since 2012.

With the exception of Latin America and the Caribbean and Sub-Saharan Africa, every region had a lower gender parity score in 2022 than in 2012. Central Asia, South Asia, and Middle East and North Africa registered their lowest gender parity scores in 16 years.

Overall, the pandemic has reversed progress on gender parity in labour-force participation, registering the lowest parity score since the index began. This gendered labour-market scarring risks becoming long term. Furthermore, the reduction of women's labour-force participation has important consequences for other dimensions of employment and in the distribution of unpaid work, which affect how women access opportunities in the economic domain, as well as other spheres of life.

Among those workers who continued in the labour force during the pandemic, unemployment rates increased. According to ILO data, at the global level, unemployment rates spiked from 5.4% in quarter 4 of 2019 to 7.9% in quarter 3 of 2020 for men, and 6.8% in 2019 to 9.6% in 2020 in the same quarter for women. While the current unemployment rates for both men and women are higher than pre-pandemic levels, women's unemployment rate in 2021 (7.8%) was higher than that of men (6.5%), as seen in Figure 2.4. Only a partial recovery is expected by 2023.