Assessment of the gender perspective in the National Reform Programme for Employment : Malta national report

Abstract

Challenges have emerged by the international economic crisis, and the downturn seems to have had a differential impact on men and women as well as on different groups of women, given their dissimilar positions within Malta’s economic and social spheres. For example, the employment growth for men fell from 1 percentage point in 2007 to -1 percent in 2009; women’s share suggests a fall from an employment growth rate of 7.9 percent in 2007 to 0.2 percent in 2009. Although women in Malta record a higher educational attainment than men, their economic activity is still largely characterised by a high and increasing share of part-time work and mini-jobs often linked to a wage penalty, low social security coverage, job insecurity, and marginalization due to the weak attachment to the labour market, and the difficulty to move into full-time jobs. Malta holds no national data of workers in the informal economy in terms of size, activities, and hours of work and trends, nevertheless, women’s involvement in undeclared work is not necessarily low.