Elena Badillo Goicoechea | March 21, 2019
In this exploratory dashboard we analyze some trends that female labor force participation (LFP) has followed in OECD countries since in the last few decades [1]. Noticing that female LFP has grown at very different rates and up to varying levels in different regions (being especially high in Nordic countries) we can use visualization tools to dig deeper into some possisble explanations.
For instance, could public policies incentivizing the substitution of leisure or housework (e.g. childcare) for market labor help explain these country-level differences?
We might first want to ask if countries with higher female LFP share some common characteristics (aside from having high LFP!). Choose a variable below to explore of how labor market outcomes, development metrics, and public sector variables relate to female LFP - remember: this is merely exploratory! We can start with government size:
From a policymaking perspective, the fact that government size is correlated with female LFP is interesting,
but doesn't tell us much by itself.
What are the
Are any spending branches clearly correlated with the gender LFP gap? Explore this by choosing any spending branch in the dropdown below and slide along its evolution since 1996... (P.S. gender LFP gap -analogous to the gender wage gap- is male LFP as a fraction of female LFP)
So, once "unpacking" total public expenditures by branch, we can find no clear correlation between any of them with gender LFP gap - which is a bit surprising in the case of social welfare expenditures. What we do see in the data (you can return to the scatterplot!), is that the ratio of expenditures in family welfare programs (e.g. childcare services, paid parental leave, and the like) seem to be quite correlated with female LFP. In this case there would be a clear mechanism: if it is the case that higher family welfare spending incentivizes women to enter (or stay in) the workforce, then it should be reflected in the way they allocate their time during the day. For instance, we'd expect more even gender distributions of time allocation to daily activities (especially in the case of paid and unpaid labor) in countries with higher social expenditure levels. (P.S. Unpaid work mainly includes child and elderly care, as well as housework)
In the treemap below, the area of each square represents the proportion of global (OECD) daily amount of minutes spent in certain type of activity contributed by a sample survey participant of each gender, for each country. By pressing the button at the right you can see the data nested the other way round - so for each country we see how time is allocated between genders. We can notice wide time use differences between genders in "big family-spending" countries and the rest, with Mexico, Turkey and Japan being at the opposite extreme than the Nordics - a divergence also shown in their family spending ratios.
It seems though, that, globally, women spend more daily time engaging in unpaid labor and less in paid work, study, and leisure.