Department of Labor Logo United States Department of Labor
Dot gov

The .gov means it's official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you're on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Employment-population ratios of women in 12 countries

December 10, 2003

Among 12 developed countries, the United States and Denmark had the highest women’s employment-population ratios in 2001—for both countries, the ratio was 57.0 percent.

Women's civilian employment-population ratios, 16 years and older, 12 countries, 2001
[Chart data—TXT]

The employment-population ratios in Sweden (56.8 percent) and Canada (56.2 percent) were nearly as high as in the U.S. and Denmark. Spain and Italy had the lowest ratios, with only one-third of all women employed in 2001.

Of the 12 countries in the chart, the Netherlands had the largest increase in the women’s employment-population ratio in the past two decades, from 31.0 percent in 1980 to 54.0 percent in 2001. This increase is attributable primarily to growth in part-time employment for women in the Netherlands.

These data are from the BLS Foreign Labor Statistics program. For more information, see "Families and work in transition in 12 countries, 1980–2001," by Gary Martin and Vladimir Kats, Monthly Labor Review, September 2003.

SUGGESTED CITATION

Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, The Economics Daily, Employment-population ratios of women in 12 countries at https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2003/dec/wk2/art03.htm (visited March 19, 2024).

OF INTEREST
spotlight
Recent editions of Spotlight on Statistics


triangle