Malta continues to trail EU on women in work

Malta is facing a big obstacle in its efforts to better its economy as women continue to stay out of the labour market.

According to a new report on equality between women and men in the EU, Malta ranks at the bottom of the table when it comes to women's employment rate.

In 2004, the most recent statistics presented in the report, only 30 per cent of women between 15 and 64 years had some kind of employment. The average in the EU stood at 55.7 per cent.

More worrying is that Malta actually appears to be losing ground compared to a few years ago. In 1999 the gender gap between men and women in employment stood at 42 per cent while in 2004 it was 43 per cent.

Malta's gender gap is by far the largest in the EU, where the trend is going the other way: The average gender gap dropped from 18.1 per cent in 1999 to 15.2 per cent in 2004.

In other areas the report gives better marks to Maltese women.

For example, the number of females between 20 and 24 years of age with at least an upper secondary level of education is now higher than for men. Last year, 48 per cent of females within this age bracket had an upper secondary education against 42 per cent of males.

The difference in pay between the two sexes also seems to be decreasing. According to the report, the pay gap in Malta fell from 12 per cent in 1999 to just four per cent in 2004.

Overall, the findings of the report highlight similar problems being faced across the EU.

One of them is the difficulty in managing a work-life balance, which means that many women are forced to leave the labour market.

The EU's female employment rate, at 55.7 per cent, is still 15 per cent lower than men's. Women who do work are often confined to a limited number of sectors - more than 40 per cent work in education, health or public administration, compared to less than 20 per cent of men.

Part-time work accounts for over 32 per cent of women's jobs, but just over seven per cent for men. Women earn 15 per cent less than men partly because they are concentrated in lower paid professions.

And women still fill relatively few top posts. Women account for just 32 per cent of managers. Only 10 per cent of members of the boards and three per cent of CEOs of larger EU enterprises are women. In Malta, women have suffered a setback in this area: The number of female managers decreased from 18 per cent in 1999 to 12 per cent in 2004.

The report states that work-life balance tensions, combined with stereotypes and gender-biased pay and evaluation systems, continue to hold women back in the job market.

On the positive side, the report found more than 75 per cent of new jobs created in the EU in the last five years have been filled by women.