What do growth, expansion and prosperity have in common? In French grammar they are feminine and when it comes to facts and figures they are feminine as well. Forget China, India and even new technologies – for the past 10 years the number one vector for global growth has been women.
Since 1970, women have held two out of three new jobs. According to The Economist, which compiled studies from a number of research firms, the arrival of this new workforce has done more to encourage global growth than increases in capital investment and improvements in productivity. “Over the last 10 years the increase in women [in the workplace] in developed countries has made more of a contribution to global growth than China has,” concludes the British weekly.
Let us look at France and the US. The female workforce is growing at an increasingly rapid rate. At the beginning of the 1950s, 7m women held a paying job in France, or about a third of the working population. Today women make up 47 per cent of the workforce. A similar scenario applies to Sweden, the UK and the US, where a third of women of working age were employed in 1950 and two-thirds today. The increased number of women in the working population compensates for the negative demographic effects of an ageing population and lower birth rates.
See full Article (paid subscription required).
Posts
