Maltese women with low job qualifications are more than twice as likely as men – and among the most likely in the EU – to be unemployed or in precarious jobs, research carried out for the EU Council Presidency has revealed.
According to a research note by the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) – ‘Gender, skills and precarious work in the EU’ – less than a third of women in Malta with up to lower secondary level education are currently in employment, compared to three-quarters of their male counterparts.
Of those, 57 per cent of women are working precariously, as opposed to just 22 per cent of men.
While the male employment figures compare favourably with the EU average, those for women lag significantly behind.
These figures point to a high risk of poverty for unemployed or precariously employed women, many of whom are financially dependent on their partners or the state, as well as raising questions about the adaptability of the workforce to continuing skill inflation. By 2025, studies suggest, around half of all jobs will require graduate or postgraduate level qualifications.
“European labour market forecasts show the biggest future demand is for high-skilled jobs in the male-dominated areas of science, technology, engineering and mathematics,” said EIGE director Virginija Langbakk.
“These job opportunities are not available for people with low levels of education and women in particular, are missing out. That is why equal access to affordable and good quality training is so important to provide new skills needed for the jobs of the future.”
Across the EU, more than six million women and two million men without upper secondary education have never been employed, posing serious challenges, researchers suggest, for the EU to achieve its 2020 employment targets.
“Low qualifications put people at a higher risk of precarious employment, which means very low pay, few working hours and insufficient job security,” Ms Langbackk said. “We found that women, in general, are more likely to work in these types of jobs than men, regardless of their level of education. More than a quarter of women employees in the EU have precarious work.”
The research note stresses the need to support people with low qualifications in acquiring the skills they need to enter the labour market and to keep up with increasing skill demands required to better their jobs.
A significant share of low qualified women and men, researchers note, lack the basic skills needed for vocational training, and have fewer available training opportunities, with only a third across the EU having received training in the past year.
The report calls for equal access to quality and inclusive education, training and life-long learning in line with the recent European Pillar of Social Rights, with more opportunities for upscaling skills introduced alongside fair working conditions that improve the quality of work for all.