The evolution of the employability of women in the Spanish labor market

Abstract

This paper focuses on the evolution of female employability in Spanish labour market, as well as, the different determinants that affect women upon deciding to keep working or not. In order to do this, a descriptive study about the subject is carried out and articles with similar objectives are revised, concluding that the situation of women in labour market has improved. However, women’s wages, in general terms, are still lower than men’s and, furthermore a lot of women occupy part-time jobs, due to the fact that they are the ones who are in charge of unpaid tasks. Secondly, the econometric model that best explains the long-term relationships between the studied variables is put forward and estimated, by means on ordinary least squares (OSL): number of children, women who have part-time jobs and who have achieved higher studies and the dependent variable, number of employed women, between the years 1987 and 2015. For this, the problems of non-stationarity of the variables are studied and a cointegration relation is proposed. Last of all, it gets a non-spurious model, with a good fit and no autocorrelation, finding that the average number of children per woman affects positively the dependent variable and the other two explicative variables behave on a different way as they are affected by the dummy variable introduced by structural change.