Research Approach

• This report presents factual up-to-date statistics on topics relevant to everyone with an interest in equality issues in NI. The main source of figures is unpublished data from the Spring 1995 Labour Force Survey. However, additional data had been obtained from the New Earnings Survey (1996), Department of Economic Development, and the Department of Health and Social Services.

Main Findings

Economic Activity

• Women in NI, regardless of age, are less likely to be economically active than men in NI and than women and men in Britain. In 1995, 47.9% of women in NI were economically active compared to 53.2% of women in GB. The largest discrepancy between women in NI and GB occurs for those aged less than 20 years; a much larger proportion of women in this age group are economically active in Britain than in NI. This is due to the higher rates of participation in education of young women in NI. More than half (54.5%) of women aged 20 years or less in NI were inactive because they were students compared to 30% in GB.
• In NI, women between the ages of 35 and 39 years have the highest economic activity rates (72.6%) and it is their participation rate which most closely resembles that of their male counterparts. In Britain the picture is somewhat different; the age group of women most likely to be economically active is older than in NI (45-49 years) and the under 20s have the highest women to men participation ratio.
• In both NI and GB, there is a clear relationship between the age of youngest child and economic activity. Women who have a youngest dependent child aged four or less are considerably less likely to be economically active than are women of working age generally. This is the pattern in both NI and GB. A significant increase in economic activity and employment rates is seen once the youngest child reaches school age.
• Women in NI with a youngest dependent child of any age (18 years or less) are less likely to be economically active than are women in GB.
• There is a clear relationship between the number of dependent children and the rates of economic activity and employment for women of working age. Women with one or more dependent child aged less than 19 years have considerably lower rates of economic activity and employment than do their counterparts who have no dependent children aged below 19 years. This pattern exists both in NI and in GB.
• In NI, a sharp decline in the level of economic activity of 16% is seen between women with three and women with four dependent children. While women with five or more dependent children are least likely of all to be economically active, the activity and employment rates are higher for these women than they are in GB.
• The economically inactive are those people who are neither seeking employment or a place on a government scheme; they do not take part in the labour market. Women account for 64% of working age people who are economically inactive. More than half of economically inactive women in both NI and GB classify themselves as looking after their family or the home. Education also accounts for a large proportion of the economically inactive, especially in NI. A third of economically inactive men and approximately a fifth of economically inactive women are students.

Employment and Unemployment

• Women and men still tend to work in different occupations, both in NI and GB. Women are under-represented in management and administration, craft and as plant and machine operatives, and they are over-represented as employees in clerical, sales and personal and protective services.
• Women in NI appear to be faring better than their British counterparts at increasing their representation in the more prestigious occupational groupings. Proportionally more women in NI work in professional occupations than in GB. In 1995, 53.2% of employees in professional occupations in Northern Ireland were women, which is 10% higher than the figure for Britain. However, clerical and secretarial jobs still account for the largest proportion of female jobs in both NI and GB.
• Four out of six occupational groups which are female dominated are marked by a high level of part-time work for women. In three occupations in NI, personal and protective services, sales and other occupations, more than three fifths of women work on a part-time basis; this is similar to the pattern in Britain.
• Over half of all female employees in NI work in public administration, education or health and social work. These industries are also significant for women's employment in Britain but to a lesser degree. Apart from public administration, these industries are less important for men's employment in NI. Two additional industries account for a large proportion of employment; wholesale, retail and motor trade; and the manufacturing industry. In the former, retail is the largest sector and women constitute more than half of the employees whereas men are in the majority in the wholesale and motor trade sectors.
• Sex segregation persists across the industrial divisions in NI and GB. Men continue to be the majority of employees in agriculture, electricity, construction and transport. Not one single woman surveyed was employed in either the fishing or mining/quarrying sectors, although these sectors do represent a very small proportion of employment in NI. On the other hand, women outnumber men in the education, health and social work, hotels and restaurant sectors. Women are also the majority of those employed in the smaller industrial sectors of finance and real estate and business.
• In NI there are, as in other UK regions, large differences in claimant based unemployment counts by gender. Whether based on seasonally adjusted or unadjusted counts, women account for approximately 21% - 22% of those unemployed people claiming benefit. The seasonally unadjusted claimant count, unlike the adjusted series, counts actual people. Using the seasonally adjusted claimant count, the number claiming unemployment related benefit, following the introduction of JSA in October 1996, had dropped by 33.5% for women and 16.8% for men. In the same period a year before, September 1995 - January 1996, the comparable change was a decline of 14.3% for women and 1% for men.

Job-Related Training

• Women and men in NI are less likely to receive training than are their counterparts in Britain. In NI, 11.3% of people in employment have received some job related training in the preceding four weeks; this compares to 13.3% of people in employment in GB.
• In NI, women who have worked in associate and professional occupations were most likely to receive job-related training in the previous four weeks. However, nearly twice as many men in professional occupations as women received job- related training. The overall pattern of occupations which are most likely to receive training in the preceding four week period is broadly the same in Britain as in NI apart from the gender imbalance in professional and associate professional and technical occupations which is less stark in Britain.
• In NI, much lower levels of training for women than for men are evident in some of the other female dominated occupations such as sales and other occupations. Even though men are in the minority in these occupational groups, they are more likely to receive training in the preceding four week period. Only 1.6% of women employees who had worked in other occupations, which comprises nearly 12% of women's employment, had received job-related training in the previous four weeks.
• In NI in 1995, female employees received more job related training than did male employees regardless of whether they worked full-time or part-time. In GB, however, men who were employed part-time were more likely to have received training than were women who were employed on the same basis. While part-time women workers in both NI and Britain received less training than full-time women workers, this was not so for men. Men who worked part-time were more likely than men who worked full-time to have received job related training in the preceding four week period.
• The main providers of training in both NI and GB are employers. However, employers in NI are less likely to pay for an employees' training than are employers in Britain; this is regardless of the sex of the person receiving training. Similar proportions of men and women in NI receive job-related training which is paid for by their employer or potential employer, whereas in Britain this is more likely to be the case for men.
• More than a quarter of women in NI who had received job-related training in 1995 paid for it themselves. This compares to only 13% of men in NI and 21.9% of women in Britain who paid for their own training.
• Overall, the pattern of where training is carried out in NI is similar for men and women. The most common locations for training are education institutions such as colleges of further education. However in GB, training is more commonly located on an employer's premises. Private training centres have become a more popular location for men's training in both NI and GB.

Earnings

• Women still earn less than men. In NI, non-manual women workers earn 71.2% of male non-manual hourly earnings; women manual workers earn 75.5% of male manual hourly earnings. Men and women in NI earn less than their counterparts in Britain. The gap between male and female hourly earnings is narrower in NI than it is in Britain.
• Women continue to earn less than men regardless of their occupational group. In NI, women's earnings relative to men's are lowest in three of the female dominated occupational groups; personal and protective services, sales, and other occupations.
• Women earn less than men regardless of industry in which they work. This pattern holds for manual and non-manual employees in both NI and GB.

Benefits

• Households in NI receive a much lower gross weekly income than those in GB.
• More households in NI than in GB are dependent on income from social security benefits. Nearly a quarter of households in NI depend on this form of income.
• While similar proportions of households received income through wages and salaries, households in NI are less likely to receive income from investments, self-employment and annuities and pensions.
• While more men than women are registered as unemployed in NI, women have greater difficulty in claiming benefits. In 1996, nearly a fifth of unemployed women received no benefits at all; this is more than twice the proportion of men who were not entitled to benefits. In addition, more unemployed women than men were dependent on unemployment benefit, but more men claimed the non-contributory income support.
• In NI and GB, lone parent households are more likely to be claiming benefit than are married/cohabiting households.
• In both NI and GB in 1995, 80% of lone parent households were headed by lone mothers.