Have the economic crises reduced the gender gap on the Spanish labour market?

Abstract

Over recent decades, women in Spain have continued to suffer a much higher unemployment rate than men, with a figure almost twice as high in some periods. This gap has however almost disappeared during the ongoing economic crisis. The aim of this paper is to explain this gender difference in the response of unemployment to the business cycle in Spain. The decomposition of changes in female employment shows the important role of the buffer effect in the 1992-1993 recession, while the segregation effect has been more significant in the ongoing recession. Estimation results support the segregation hypothesis: the concentration of women in less-cyclical sectors reduces their job losses during recession, so that the unemployment gap falls. However, the buffer effect for men appears to be greater than that for women, which is partly explained by more temporality in male-dominated industries.