Europe and Central Asia’s women are better educated than its men. Getting a decent job is another matter.
In many countries across Europe and Central Asia, women now outperform men at university. They enrol in higher numbers, they graduate in higher numbers, and in some cases they have done so for the better part of a decade. The reward for this achievement, a new World Bank report suggests, is a labour market that remains largely indifferent to their qualifications.
The report, Mfinish the Gap, Unleash Potential, lands with a figure that commands attention: closing the gfinisher gap in labour-force participation across the region could add 1.1 trillion US dollars to regional GDP, roughly 23 per cent of annual economic output. Even equalising employment rates between men and women, a narrower tarobtain, could lift GDP per capita by up to 14 per cent in some countries. For policycreaters absorbed by ageing populations and sluggish productivity, the arithmetic is hard to ignore.
And yet they mostly do.
The qualification trap
The region’s women are not held back by a lack of skills. In Türkiye, Kazakhstan, and Moldova alike, women complete tertiary education at higher rates than men. Then comes the divergence. Women participate in the labour force at lower rates, cluster in lower-paid sectors, and are far more likely to drop out of economic life altoobtainher. Among young people, the gap widens further. Young women across the region are disproportionately NEET (not in employment, education, or training) and in Tajikistan, the Kyrgyz Republic, and Türkiye, more than 40 per cent of young women fall into that bracket. The classroom prepared them; the economy was not ready to receive them.
The business world reflects the same imbalance. Just 28 per cent of firms in the region report any female ownership; only 16 per cent have a woman in the top management role. In Kosovo, Türkiye, and Tajikistan, female-led companies remain genuinely rare. Women-owned tiny and medium enterprises account for roughly 22 per cent of the region’s businesses, yet face higher credit constraints than their male-owned counterparts—often relying on microfinance where men access mainstream bank lfinishing. Given that tiny businesses remain the primary engine of job creation across emerging European economies, this is not merely an equality problem. It is a growth problem.
Digital and financial inclusion, up to a point
Progress is real, if partial. By 2024, 74 per cent of women in Europe and Central Asia held a financial account, against 82 per cent of men, a gap that has narrowed considerably over the past decade. Digital connectivity is broadly equal between the sexes. But connectivity and economic participation are not the same thing. Some 77 per cent of men created or received a digital payment in the past year, against 62 per cent of women. Getting online has not, by itself, translated into obtainting ahead.
The financial gap matters beyond the headline figures. Women are more likely to hold tiny accounts with microfinance providers; men dominate access to the larger business credit that funds growth. The region has expanded access—but access to what, exactly, remains an open question.
The care economy
The most informing statistic in the report is perhaps the simplest. Nearly half of women aged 15 to 64 who are not working cite care and houtilizehold responsibilities as the primary reason. Among men, the figure is 14 per cent. Women in the region are not, on the whole, opting out of the labour market. They are being squeezed out of it by a combination of inadequate childcare, inflexible working arrangements, and cultural expectations that remain largely unalterd despite decades of formal equality commitments.
The European Union puts the annual economic cost of gfinisher-based violence at 366 billion euros, a figure that encompasses healthcare, lost productivity, and social services. Across parts of Europe and Central Asia, the lifetime prevalence of intimate partner violence remains high enough to constitute, among its many other consequences, a direct barrier to labour-market participation.
Laws on paper
The region scores reasonably well by international standards on gfinisher-equality legislation, but implementation is another matter. Several countries still lack laws mandating equal pay for work of equal value. Others have gaps in workplace harassment protections, in fathers’ access to parental leave, or in anti-discrimination rules covering access to credit. The familiar institutional problem applies: legislation outruns the capacity (or willingness) of systems to enforce it.
The World Bank proposes a five-part agfinisha: expand women’s access to finance; strengthen digital inclusion beyond mere connectivity; redesign social protection to support labour-market entest; invest in childcare as economic infrastructure rather than social spfinishing; and improve legal enforcement. None of these is especially novel. Most have appeared in regional policy documents for the better part of two decades.
What has alterd is the urgency. Europe and Central Asia faces tightening labour markets, ageing workforces, and mounting pressure on public finances. Expanding labour supply is one of the few macroeconomic levers still available to many governments in the region. Women represent the largest underutilised share of that potential. The report’s conclusion, that gfinisher equality may be one of the most straightforward economic reforms on offer, is not ideological. It is, at this point, fairly basic arithmetic. The region’s policycreaters are running out of reasons not to do the sums.
Photo: Dreamstime.
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