Tyranny of numbers

In an IIEA panel held (virtually) on March 9, 2022, Nadereh Chamlou asked how sanctions have impacted women’s employment (about min 1:22 in the video). My answer was that identifying the impact of sanctions on women’s employment is difficult but that I thought that Covid hit women harder than sanctions. The loss of female employment has been observed around the world, where women had to quit their jobs to care for their children whose schools were closed, or had other Covid-related extra household work. Later on, Hashem Pesaran questioned my conjecture on the importance of Covid for women’s employment, which is why after the panel I looked more carefully at the labor force survey data, which confirm my statement.

The data from LFS for the past ten years show that the number of women employed reached its maximum during 2018-2019 at 4.3 million, when sanctions were toughest. This number fell to 3.7 million in 2020, most likely because of Covid since sanctions did not intensify in 2020. Furthermore, this decline was not matched by decline in men’s employment as the ratio of female to male employment also fell in 2020 for all age groups (see Table below). For prime age workers (25-54 years old), this ratio fell from 24.4% in 2019 to 21.3% in 2020. Roughly twice as many women lost their jobs in 2020 compared to men (665,000 vs. 357,000).