The recovery of the labor market continued in March and the women were the protagonists. The National Administrative Department of Statistics (Dane) reported that in March the unemployment rate stood at 12.2%, an advance of 2.6 percentage points compared to that of the same month of the year 2021.
(Unemployment in March in Colombia was 12.1%).
The entity highlighted how in the third month of 2022, compared to the figures for March last year, the labor market recorded a recovery of 1.58 million employeesbecause while last year there was a figure of 20.09 million employed, in the last report this amounted to 21.6 million workers.
Women were the group with the best figures in recovery of employment, since of the total, they took up 998,000 of these places, while in men 587,000 people rejoined the market.
(Generate 1,000 jobs, the goal of Emergia Colombia).
“Of three new positions that we saw between March and March, two were filled by women. For every man who got his job back, two women did it simultaneously”, assured the director of Dane, Juan Daniel Oviedo, who relates it especially to the resumption of face-to-face education.
“We are seeing educated, trained women who were forced out of the labor force,” Oviedo said.
The director of the Dane also highlighted that in sectors such as commerce, artistic activities, entertainment, and work in other services, there was also a significant rise in female employment.
QUALIFIED EMPLOYMENT
The Dane also announced that in March an important advance was seen in the population with high levels of schooling who had stopped working.
According to the levels of education, not only the employed population with basic levels was seen to grow, but also a growth of 21.2% in the population with technical training, and 14.7% in the employed population with university training, and even a recovery of 38.8% in workers with postgraduate degrees.
“Almost 40% of the employed population was in skilled labor, technical and professional training,” Oviedo assured.
Likewise, if you look at people who are looking for a job from the point of view of unemployment, the director of the Dane also assured that a improvement in the quality of employment conditions because only between 9% and 10% of the unemployed population has a university degree in the country. “We only see 43,000 unemployed people with graduate degrees and a significant number of 279,000 people with college degrees,” he said.
Jackeline Piraján, an economist at Scotiabank Colpatria, highlighted that there was “a reintegration into the labor market of women with a technical education qualification, also university and postgraduate degrees, which is important news, given that people previously were located or were on All dedicated to household chores.
Unemployment
The reduction of the national unemployment rate implied a drop in the population in this condition, from 3.47 million in March 2021 to 2.99 million unemployed in March 2022, a difference of 480,000 people.
In this case, the relationship was inverse, since men were the ones who left unemployment more easily in March, since of the total, 57% of the people who left unemployment were men: 278,000, while women were only 202,000.
Although the gender gap in unemployment remains, the recovery in the female market was greater. The unemployment rate for women went from 19% in March 2021 to 15.6%, a reduction of 3.4 percentage points. In men it went from 11.8% to 9.6%, an improvement of 2.2 points.
María Claudia Llanes, an economist at BBVA Research for Colombia, mentioned how, from now on, it is expected that “employment will continue to be driven by the greater dynamism of the service economy, which is highly labor-intensive and shows high levels of economic activity. economic”.
LAURA LUCIA BECERRA ELEJALDE
BRIEFCASE
