Female labor force participation in Israel, 1955-2017

ABSTRACT

This article reviews the female labour force participation rates (LFPR) of Jewish and Arab women in Israel from 1955 to 2017. One finding of the review is that the female Jewish LFPR are very high, while the female Arab LFPR are very low. We argue that the most likely explanation for this difference is cultural forces in the respective communities which either encourage or discourage women from working. We find support for this idea from LFPR data within subsectors of the two groups, Bedouin women living in the south of Israel, and Jewish women born in the land of Israel.

KEYWORDS:

• Labour force participation rates
• women in the workforce
• Israel’s economy
• Jewish women
• Arab women

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The population and labour force data is from various years of ICBS’s Statistical Annuals. This data is available at www.cbs.gov.il.

2. For a discussion of this theory see Goldin, “The U-Shaped Female Labor.”

3. It should be noted that since 2010 the Israeli government has made some efforts to fund professional training programmes for Israeli Arab women to increase their employment possibilities, see Jack Khoury, “More Israeli Arab Women Out of Work Despite Government Funding,” (Ha’aretz, 2 August 2016), https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-more-arab-women-out-of-work-despite-govt-funding-1.5419279, accessed July 2018.

4. In 2016, the population of Arab women 15 and above was 577,200, of which 81% were Muslims, 10% were Christians and 9% were Druze. Data from ICBS Statistical Annual 2017, Table 12.10.

5. ICBS Statistical Annual 2017, Table 3.13.

6. ICBS Statistical Annual 1985, Table 22.1.

7. ICBS Statistical Annual 1996, Table 22.1.

8. ICBS Statistical Annual 2018, Table 8.76.

9. ICBS Statistical Annual 1975, Table 2.22.

10. ICBS Statistical Annual 1996, Table 2.19.

11. ICBS Statistical Annual 2016, Table 2.4.

12. Data can be found at imf.org accessed July 2018.

13. Cornfeld and Danieli, “The Origins Of Income Inequality.”

14. OECD (2018), Gender wage gap (indicator). doi:10.1787/7cee77aa-en. Accessed December 2018.

15. Grossbard-Shechtman and Neuman, “The Extra Burden of Muslim.”

16. Yashiv and Kasir, “Arab women in the Israeli.”

17. Economist, “Briefing: Indian women: A job of her own,” (7 July 2018) 14–18.

18. ICBS, Labour Survey of 2015, population 15 and up, Table 8.1.

19. The book was re-published in a critical edition by Raider and Raider-Roth, The Plough Woman.

20. The data for men and women for 1955 are from ICBS Labour Force Survey, November 1955, Special Series no. 61, September 1957, p. 20, Table 11.

21. Data from ICBS Statistical Annual 1981, Table 12:3, p. 325.

22. Data from ICBS Statistical Annual 2018, Table 12:5.

23. Data from various editions of the ICBS Statistical Annuals.

24. Ibid.

25. Data in table from World Bank. The data listed is the first and last years of available data for each area, and once a year is included in the table, then the available data for that year for the other areas was included as well.

26. The data for 1955 are from ICBS Labour Force Survey, November 1955, Special Series no. 61, September 1957, p. 20, Table 11. The LFPR for Jewish women born in Israel from the Labour Force Survey, 37.4% is also recorded in ICBS Statistical Annual 1959, Table 16.11, p. 304. However, later editions of the Statistical Annuals, as for example ICBS Statistical Annual 1973, table 12.6, record that the LFPR for Jewish women born in Israel in 1955 was 27.4%. This latter number appears to be a typo since it does not accord with the LFPR data for this category of women for 1958, 37.8%, and for 1960, 36.8%, and if this figure was a correction, then also the overall female LFPR for 1955 would have to be corrected, but the same number appears for 1955 in all data from the ICBS. All the other data in Table four is from various editions of ICBS Statistical Annuals.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrew Schein

Andrew Schein is a Senior Lecturer in economics at Netanya Academic College, Israel.