93% of the pending jobs to be recovered in Latin America are for women, according to the ILO

While there has been an economic recovery and jobs lost in Latin America and the Caribbean due to the pandemic, 4.5 million people still need to be incorporated into the labor market to reach pre-COVID-19 figures, of which the 93% of the jobs correspond to womenas reported by the International Labor Organization (ILO).

Vinicius Pinheiro, director of the ILO for Latin America, warned that the employment crisis that the region is suffering could extend until 2023 or 2024. “Two years after the start of the pandemic, the recovery in employment has been lackluster. The labor outlook for the region is uncertain, the health emergency due to the pandemic is not over, and growth expectations are not so encouraging,” he declared.

The report “2021 Labor Outlook for Latin America and the Caribbean” reflects that there is a worrying female and youth unemployment, hampered by the greater incidence of informality and in the economic sectors most affected by the health crisis.

The average unemployment rate for women was exactly the same between 2020 and 2021, standing at 12.4%, still far from the 9.4% of 2019.

“The most intense impact among women in the region is associated with the greater presence of women in economic sectors strongly affected by the crisis, such as hotels and restaurants, and in other service activities and the household sector. On the other, to the higher incidence of informality among women”, reads the report.

The persistence of informality and the absence of protection Social are the “comorbidities” that Pinheiro points out as causing a “greater vulnerability” in the region “compared to the rest of the world”, both in health and economic terms, and has warned that the employment indicators shown in the report paint an unfavorable picture that threatens to increase the job childish and generate more instability political and social in the region.