Labour market barriers to improving the employment status of Maltese women

Abstract

The term disadvantaged refers to a group of workers readily identifiable on the basis of a demographic characteristic such as age, sex, or race, which, in comparison to the labour force as a whole, has, on an average, lower wages, less desirable occupations, and higher unemployment rates. Given this definition, women may be classified as a disadvantaged group in the Maltese labour force on the basis of wages, and occupational distribution. (No effort will be made to compare unemployment data for Maltese men and women. The data do not include a good indication of how many people actually want jobs, and therefore they are not very useful for analytical purposes).