ABSTRACT
Though labor markets across the world are dominated by men, the gender-based labor force participation gap has been narrowing in recent decades by the growing number of women participating. Although this gap has been recently decreasing, it is still at high rates for various reasons. In this chapter, it is intended to shed light on the underlying determinants of this phenomenon. Based on the latest data, the study concludes that (i) men in the workforce are more numerous than women, (ii) women’s labor force participation has been rising all over the world in the last century, however still there are restrictions to women’s work, (iii) generally women spend a great amount of their time to non-economic activities. This study also emphasises a relationship between the women’s participation rate and economic development (a U-shaped relationship), based on findings of recent empirical studies and graphs for example.
