Namibian woman voter casting her ballot for the national elections held in late November 2009. The ruling SWAPO party has won an overwhelming victory in the poll. SWAPO led the country to independence in 1990 after a thirty year struggle for freedom.
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire File Photos
Tuesday, 04 January 2011 00:00
Nigerian Guardian
YOUTH is the time of life full of promise, aspiration and energy. Between childhood and adulthood, youth is when men and women are most eager to strike out to secure their futures and to contribute to their families, communities and societies. This stage of life is crucial in determining young peoples’ paths to achieving productive employment and decent work.
One billion young people will reach working age within the next decade. Providing them with the opportunity to secure productive employment and decent work is a societal, national and global challenge. It is no wonder that youth employment is listed high on the international community’s agenda. This is the best educated and best trained generation of young men and especially young women ever.
They possess skills that can make communities flourish and nations strengthen and seek opportunities for personal autonomy and active citizenship. We are getting more children to school but we are failing to get them into productive employment and decent work.
While rapid globalization and technological change may offer new opportunities for productive work and incomes for some, for many working age young people the lack of decent job prospects increases their vulnerability in the transition from childhood to adulthood. The investment of governments in education and training will be lost if young people do not move into productive jobs that enable them to support themselves, contribute to their families’ earnings, and pay their public dues.
However, on average, young women and men are two to three times more likely to be unemployed than adults, and this is particularly pronounced for young women. All too often, they work unacceptably long hours under informal, intermittent and insecure work arrangements, characterized by low productivity, meager earnings and reduced labour protection.
Poor employment in the early stages of young peoples’ careers can harm their self-esteem and their employment prospects throughout their lives. Underemployed or unemployed youth will have less money to spend as current consumers as well as to save and invest for future security. This in turn will have negative impacts on present and upcoming businesses and economies. Without the prospect of stable employment for young women and men, societies pay a high price as well.
Excluded youth who find themselves alienated from society, frustrated by lack of opportunity and without financial means are more vulnerable to personal and socially destructive behaviour and more prone to engage in illegal and dangerous activities.
Youth employment is very much linked to the overall employment situation. It has its own dimensions however, which require specific responses. In developed economies, youth unemployment may be linked to the school to work transition, various forms of discrimination, disadvantages linked to lack of job experience, cyclical labour market trends, and a number of structural factors. In developing economies it may be linked to insufficient growth and development and may affect those who do not share in the benefits of globalization. In many poor communities underemployment and working poverty are acute problems for many young women and men as they struggle to earn incomes. A large number of poorly educated rural youth cannot thrive due to lack of support in terms of policy, infrastructure, and inputs. This has important consequences for agriculture. Investment in infrastructure and skills development in agriculture is key in light of growing food shortages.
The particular dimensions of youth employment vary according to sex, age, ethnicity, educational level and training, family background, health status and disability, amongst others. Young people as a group are not homogenous. Some groups are more vulnerable and face particular disadvantages in entering and remaining in the labour market. The danger is that with a build-up of grievances, vulnerable youth may become “discouraged youth”, implying that undertaking job searches would be futile. They lose faith in the system of governance that they feel has failed to live up to their expectations, and in severe cases this can lead to political instability and the rise of extremism.
Eighty-five per cent of young people live in developing countries where many are especially vulnerable to extreme poverty. The ILO estimates that around 85.3 million young women and men were unemployed throughout the world in 2006, accounting for 44 per cent of all unemployed persons globally. Many more young people are struggling to eke out a living in the informal economy. Child labourers often end up as unemployed, unskilled youth. Younger children are hired to replace them for lower pay, and the chances of securing an education for either set are significantly reduced. There are an estimated 59 million young people between 15 and 17 years of age who are engaged in hazardous forms of work.
Migration trends strongly influence the global labour market picture. There are no estimates on the share of young migrants among the 175 million global migrants around the world. It is clear that with growing cross-border transfers of labour more and more young people will leave their homes in the hopes of finding work leading to movement from rural to urban areas or to other countries.
This will have an impact on the labour markets in their countries as well as abroad. With globalization and current demographic patterns, migration is increasingly become a key economic, social and political issue, and detailed data will be needed to judge the impact of migration patterns on the labour force.
The foundations for gender and youth employment are strongly determined in equal access to education for girls and boys. Good quality education remains a key pathway to increasing women’s opportunities and to educate a woman is to educate families and societies. Without quality education chances of getting a decent job are low. Significant progress towards the goal of universal primary education has been made in most regions, with gender parity having been achieved in 118 countries.
In some cultures however, when families have limited resources they may feel they have to choose between educating their sons or daughters, and the daughters tend to be excluded first. The literacy gap between young men and young women appears to be widening in Africa and Asia. The greatest gender inequalities are found in North Africa and Western Asia. Countries in East Asia and the Pacific have come close to achieving gender parity in access to education, while in Latin America and the Caribbean there appears to be a slight bias against boys.
It is not just the level of education achieved, but the quality and relevance of education and training that is important. Indirect discrimination against girls results in stereotyping them as less interested or capable in certain subjects – for example, maths and sciences. Textbooks often show men in dominant commercial roles and women in subservient, subordinate roles.
Providing young women and men with formal and non-formal educational possibilities, including vocational training would lead to their empowerment. In the past several decades, more women than men have pursued higher education in some countries. However, this has not necessarily led to better labour market outcomes for women, as sex-based discriminatory practices may influence their recruitment.
Investments during youth’s life transitions are underlined as being particularly important for girls because they have very different trajectories from that of boys. Gender differences emerge sharply with the onset of puberty, signalling the potential of pregnancy and leading to concerns about protecting girls in some societies, sometimes to the point of overly restricting them. Puberty often marks when boys are expected to work for pay.
Female education is closely correlated with smaller family size, more decision-making responsibility, and higher income. But in general, young women have even more difficulties finding work than young men. Even where young women’s education is higher than men’s it is when they try find work that they experience labour market discrimination. Evidence from ILO School to Work Transition surveys shows that in a number of countries young women have a more protracted and difficult transition to working life than young men.
Very often they have even more limited access to information channels and job search mechanisms than young men, and importantly, employers in a range of countries revealed a striking preference to hire young men rather than young women for a variety of reasons. Even though there are countries and regions where unemployment is lower for young women than for young men, this often only means that women do not even try to find a job but leave the labour market, altogether discouraged. When they do find a job it is often lower paid and in the informal economy, in unprotected low-skill jobs which imply greater job insecurity, as well as lack of access to training, social protec- tion and other resources, making them comparatively more vulnerable to poverty and marginalization.
It follows that labour force participation rates for young women are lower than for young men. The largest gaps in labour force participation of young men versus women are found in South Asia (35 percentage points) and the Middle East and North Africa (29 percentage points).
The gaps mainly reflect differing cultural traditions and the lack of opportunities for women to combine work and family duties. This is true not only in the developing world but also in the industrialized world. The lower value placed on women’s economic contributions and prevailing views that women only generate second or third incomes in households contribute to this reality. They may face discrimination because of the perception that as soon as they marry and have children they will be less productive or will leave their jobs.
Many young women may become despondent and wonder whether academic achievement actually leads to access to employment commensurate with their qualifications.
Gender discrimination, cultural traditions and the lack of opportunities often leave women with traditional unpaid, family-based work. This is prevalent among rural youth. In North Africa, for example, 78.4 per cent of the young female population where inactive and the female youth unemployment rate exceeded that of male youth by 14 percentage points in 2005. Where prospects for finding work are low for all young people, young women are generally the first to give up their hopes of getting a job to stay at home. In Latin America, women are the majority in the group of those who study only, and among those who do not study or work. In the region, the participation rates of young women are also much lower than those of young men.
Managing household chores has long been viewed as a female occupation and as hampering young women’s employment. In Europe, a higher proportion of women than men feel that they do more than their fair share of housework In Latin America, almost 30% of young women who do not study or work are engaged solely in household chores and care-giving. But practically none of the young men - representing 28% of the total number of young persons who did not study or work - were engaged in domestic chores.
They are in high-risk situations of falling into illegal forms of subsistence. Juvenile delinquency in the region among males is increasing at accelerated rates. In cultures where there are pressures to conform to societal expectations by entering early marriages, parenthood is one of the factors that perpetuates the intergenerational cycle of poverty for both young women and men. The social and economic costs are high for both individuals and communities.
Many young girls in the developing world have little option but to get married which, given their poor family backgrounds, is most likely just a move from one poor household to the next. In some parts of the world this reinforces the lack of parental investment in the education of girls since girls are perceived to leave the family upon marriage. In addition, early pregnancy may cause complications. Even in regions where there are drops in fertility rates, early pregnancy is one the pitfalls restricting access to productive jobs, particularly among poor women with little education.
Whether married or unmarried, young women facing maternity may find themselves with the additional tasks of caring for infants, extra household chores, increased financial burdens and curtailed chances of earning a decent income.
Reproductive health and conditions of work in which young people operate are pressing occupational health and safety considerations. Young people are often given the most dangerous and physically taxing of jobs without adequate training or security measures. Young men in particular are at high risk of being assigned the most dangerous and undesirable jobs, yet when unemployment looms these may be the only ones available.
An important employment challenge is to tackle occupational segregation of traditionally accepted “male” and “female” jobs and to break the barriers in opening up professions to both sexes. Unaware of their legal rights and often lacking enough role models, women are only slowly penetrating into the professions traditionally dominated by men. Young women, particularly in developing countries, are often unable to take advantage of training opportunities due to barriers to entry, discrimination in selection and gender stereotyping.
Stereotyping is frequently found in vocational guidance and counseling on the part of school staff or employment services, and it discourages young women from taking training programmes that would lead them to higher long-term earnings and improved employability. In many countries, for example, young women are encouraged to train in relatively low-skilled and poorly paid “feminine” occupations with little prospect of upward mobility. These occupations are often related to household work, such as food preparation and garment manufacturing, while young men are encouraged to go for modern technology-based training and employment. Segregation also exists at higher levels of education, where women are often steered towards the traditional caring occupations of teaching and nursing.
These are important professions for the economic and social welfare of countries and women make crucial contributions by working in these key sectors where labour shortages have developed and will continue. But men should be equally encouraged to embrace these professions, thereby also breaking gender barriers.
Similarly, professions that have been labeled or are perceived as “masculine” should be opened up to women with the interests and competencies necessary to do the jobs. Ironically, what may be considered a mostly feminine profession in one culture – for example, construction labour in India – is seen as masculine in other.
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