Women's access to economic opportunities in Serbia

Žarković-Rakić, Jelena and Vladisavljević, Marko (2016) Women's access to economic opportunities in Serbia. Technical Report. World Bank Group, Washington, D.C.

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Abstract

After more than a decade of progress in building an institutional infrastructure for gender equality, the overall economic opportunities among women in Serbia still lag those among men. Women, on average, earn 86 percent of the wages of their coworkers who are men after one controls for differences in educational and job characteristics. In the labor market, women who have the same work profiles as men have similar chances to be employed; however, there are many obstacles confronting women in joining the labor market in the first place. Gender inequalities are pronounced in rural areas, where a high number of women serving as unpaid family members are deprived of the right to social security. Furthermore, the recently published Gender Equality Index ranks Serbia 12 percentage points below European Union average. The Index highlights areas where particular efforts are needed such as the domain of work, access to financial resources, and social activities (domain of time). This report focuses on better understanding the factors that influence women’s economic opportunities in particular, an area in which significant inequalities remain. Women’s economic opportunity is defined as a set of laws, regulations, and practices that allow women to participate in the workforce under conditions roughly equal to those of men, whether as wage-earning employees or as owners of businesses. As such, the report looks into the ability of women to accumulate and build-up critical endowments - education and health – and to participate in the labor market and have access to jobs. By reviewing the institutions and policies relevant to gender equality in access to economic opportunities in Serbia, the intention is also to point out necessary improvements in policies and programs that will encourage women’s participation in the workplace and thus create a more productive economy overall. The analysis mostly relies on exploiting a new dataset for Serbia, the Survey on Income and Living Conditions (SILC), together with Labor Force Survey (LFS) data. Findings show that gender equality exists in Serbia in terms of both participation in and attainment of education. Women in the prime age group have better educational characteristics than men of the same age, while the opposite holds for the older population of women. Gender educational gaps among the poor and the bottom 40 percentof the income distribution (the bottom 40) are similar in size relative to the corresponding gaps in the general population. Nevertheless, individuals living in rural areas and the Roma population are disadvantaged and tend to have larger gender educational gaps. According to our findings,in rural areas, women have lower average educational attainment. Early school leavers among women are also more likely to live in rural areas. Number of indicators, such as,the enrolment rates in secondary education, average number of years spent in education and percentage of population that can expect to complete postsecondary education, have significantly lower values among Roma than nonRoma population.

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