The female participation rate has been improving for years and in the last quarter of 2018 it seems to have broken another barrier: there were more women than men aged 15-24 – as a percentage - who were active.
The category had 55.2 per cent of men active, compared with 56.6 for women.
The next category up, those aged 25-54, still had men in the lead, although the percentage for women is going up in both this category and the 55-64 one, compared with a year ago.
JobsPlus chairman Clyde Caruana had said recently that while the older cohort of women may still feature very little in the workplace, as they move out of the working age category, they are being replaced by younger ones.
“I estimate that in the next four to five years, Malta will reach the EU average for female participation. It is encouraging that in the 25-29 age group, we have the highest female employment rate in the EU, even higher than in Scandinavia. And it is likely that the 30-34 age group will soon also top the rankings.”
The National Statistics Office figures for the labour force released on Monday showed that there were 239,427 working out of 412,385 people available for work, up from 227,167 of the 401,510 available a year earlier.
This represents increase of 5.4 per cent in employment.
On average, out of every 100 persons aged between 15 to 64 years, 72 were employed. The male employment rate for this age bracket was 82.3 per cent while that for females stood at 61.5 per cent.
The NSO figures showed that there were 4,463 over 65s working, compared with 3,552 a year earlier. However, the numbers of employees start to dwindle as from the 25-34 for both men and women.
Self-employed persons accounted for 14.1 per cent of all persons with a main job. The majority of employed persons worked on a full-time basis totaling 204,683 and a further 34,744 had a part-time job as their primary employment.
The unemployment rate for the fourth quarter of 2018, stood at 3.5 per cent, with the main reason for inactivity being that persons had reached retirement age or took up early retirement (42.1 per cent).