Female unemployment rate in Nigeria as of Q4 2020 increased to 35.2% from 31.6% recorded in Q2 2020. This is according to the recent labour force report, released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).
According to the report, a total of 61.63 million women were in the working population (15 – 64 years of age) as of Q4 2020 accounting for 50.5% of the total working population.
However, only 30.15 million of these women were willing and able to work i.e labour force, which represents about 43.3% of the total labour force in the period under review.
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Highlights
- Distributing women in the working population by their age groups, women within the age bracket of 15-24 years were the largest, accounting for 30% (18.48 million) of the total women in the working population.
- Women within 25-34 years followed closely with about 17.98 million being in the working population, while 12.79 million women in the working population were within the age bracket of 35-44 years.
- The numbers however started to drop significantly in the older age ranges as only 7.94 million women in the working population were between 45-54 years of age.
- Similarly, women in the working population between 55-64 years stood at 4.43 million as of Q4 2020.
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It is worth noting that out of the 30.15 million women in the workforce during the period under review, a total of 10.61 million women were unemployed indicating a female unemployment rate of 35.2%. The under-employment rate of women during the period was however lower, standing at 24.2%.
The Q4 2020 female unemployment rate of 35.2% is a rise from the 31.6% recorded as at the last time the labour force report was released by the NBS, although the under-employment rate declined from 31.0% in Q2 2020 to 24.2% in Q4 2020.
A closer look at the numbers showed that women in the labour force fell from 38.63 million in Q2 2020 to 30.15 million in Q4 2020.
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What this means
- The latest unemployment figures show that despite the relatively equal representation of the female gender in the working population, women accounted for just 43.3% in terms of labour force as against 47.7% for males.
- Also, considering the number of fully employed and underemployed labour force, females accounted for 40% and 45.9% respectively.
- Meanwhile, the total number of unemployed females stood at 10.61 million (35.2%) relative to 12.58 million unemployed males (31.8). This shows that more females in the working population in Nigeria are either unable or unwilling to work as at the reference period.
