Unemployment in Slovenia: Impact of Gender Disparities During Unemployment Spells

Abstract

Human capital is one of the most important driving forces for economic competitiveness, development and growth. One half of a nation’s skills, knowledge, and productivity is represented by women. In the long run a country’s economic performance depends on how effectively and to what extent female talent is well utilized. Our survival analysis of gender disparities in duration of unemployed spells in Slovenia was based on a dataset with more than 450,000 unemployment spells for individuals between January 2004 and July 2008. The empirical analysis based on Kaplan-Meier estimates of survival function suggests that gender disparities in the duration of unemployment spells in Slovenia are significant. Our database shows that there are 107% more unemployment spells for women with tertiary education compared to men with the same level of education. This fact is indicating unexploited potential and underuse of female talents which, if accessed, could contribute to higher competitiveness and overall stronger economic growth of the country.gender, unemployment, survival analysis, Kaplan-Meier, Slovenia