5.3  Employment and participation of particular groups of women in the OECD (continued)

Given New Zealand’s position in Figure 18a and Figure 21 it is not surprising that New Zealand has a very low employment rate for sole parents who have a child aged under 6 (32%).[19] This rate is the second-lowest in the OECD, ahead only of Australia (30%). By way of comparison, over 70% of Portuguese, Austrian and Italian sole parents with a child aged under 6 are employed.[20]

In general, New Zealand does not stand out from the rest of the OECD in an analysis of women’s participation by educational attainment. International comparisons are difficult in this area, however, because of the differences in educational systems between countries and because of the opacity of the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) which is commonly used to make comparisons between OECD countries. It does appear, however, that New Zealand women who have attained a degree have relatively low employment rates compared to women with a degree in other OECD countries, although there is little to separate most countries (Figure 23). This relatively low participation of New Zealand women with a degree may be due to the low participation rates of women with young children in New Zealand. Even mothers of young children who have a post-school qualification have relatively low participation rates in New Zealand (see Table 3).

Figure 23 – Employment of women 25-54 with a university degree, 2002

Source: OECD Labour Market Statistics, 2002 data.

A university degree is defined here as the attainment of ISCED level 5A or 6.

5.4  Accounting for paid parental leave

The previous section has shown that differences between countries can be attributed in part to differences in the participation of, and prevalence of, different types of families. At least some of the difference between countries, however, might simply be due to the definition of “participation”. We illustrate this by comparing participation rates in New Zealand to those in the highest-participating countries in the OECD, the Nordic countries.

In official statistics, women on paid parental leave should be counted as employed, even though they are not working.[21] Nordic countries have amongst the most generous paid parental leave provisions in the OECD but New Zealand has one of the least generous provisions (Table 8). Therefore at least some of the difference between the best performers of the OECD and New Zealand could be due to the unproductive “employment” of women on paid parental leave, who might equally be considered as not in the labour force, since they are not at work or available for work.

Source: Social Policy Research Unit, University of York ( http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/spru/research/summs/welempfc.htm).

The maximum effect of these differences in paid parental leave can be modelled by assuming that women take the maximum leave available for all their children and adjusting the reported participation figures to reflect this. Figure 24 shows that after this adjustment there is a marked ‘dipping’ in participation rates in the Nordic countries. When adjusted, the profile of women’s employment rates in these countries loses its n-shape, and becomes much more like the profile in New Zealand. The difference in participation rates of women aged 25 to 39 years is also markedly reduced after adjustment.

Figure 24 – Women’s participation in Nordic countries and in New Zealand, raw and adjusted for maximum time on paid parental leave

Source: OECD Labour Market Statistics, 2003 data; age-specific fertility rates from Eurostat on-line data.

Participation rates for the Nordic countries are the mean, for each age group, for Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Finland and Sweden.

This may indicate that some of the difference in participation rates between countries, at least in the peak child-bearing ages, is an artefact arising from the way women on paid parental leave are treated in labour force statistics.