More females getting jobs than male counterparts – GSS Report

A report by the Ghana Statistical Services (GSS) has revealed more females are getting jobs than their male colleagues.

According to the GSS’Annual Household Income and Expenditure Survey (AHIES) for the year 2023, out of the 11.39 million Ghanaians employed by the third quarter of 2023, 6.44 million were females as against 5.52 million males.

This notwithstanding, unemployment rate for females increased from 17.5% in the 2nd quarter of 2023 to 17.7% in the 3rd quarter. This is higher than the unemployment rate for males which remained stable at 10.9% between the 2nd quarter of 2023 and the 3rd quarter of 2023.

The report said consistently, more females than males have been employed, with the difference averaging about 600,000 and 900,000 for 2022 and 2023 respectively.
The survey indicated that the average unemployment rate for the first three quarters of 2023 was 14.7 per cent.

“The sharp increase in the unemployment rate of females between the fourth quarter of 2022 and the first quarter of 2023 has culminated in a wider unemployment gender gap in 2023 relative to 2022,” the report noted.

“Females had a much lower share of jobs as plant and machine operators or assemblers (averaging 0.3% across the first three quarters of 2023) than males (averaging 11.0% for the same period), the study highlighted,” the study highlighted.

It was also disclosed that there were more females engaged in vulnerable employment, a rate which has been consistently higher for females than males by about 20 percentage points across all seven quarters.