By: Staff Writer
September 21, 2021
An Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) study on education levels and unemployment in Barbados provided clear evidence that women were less likely to have lost jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic than under-educated males.
The IDB report, Does Education prevent job losses during downturns, looked at education records in Barbados between 1987 to 2002 and found that during the current COVID-19 downturn that while females attained higher grades than their male counterparts during those years they were more likely to have kept their jobs during the pandemic compared to their male counterparts.
Following the conventional wisdom that education and training better equips workers overall, the study also found that in Barbados females had higher overall scores than males before secondary schools.
In addition, females were more likely to have two additional years of tertiary education than males in Barbados and more likely to have a university degree.
The report also said, “The pandemic generated large declines in employment. Employment fell by roughly 20 percentage points between February and May 2020. However, by November 2020, after the government relaxed some of the mobility restrictions, employment levels were almost at pre-pandemic levels. Of the roughly 20 (25) percent of females (males) who lost their job between February and May 2020, about 55 (75) percent of females (males) were employed by November 2020– mainly due to reemployment in the same pre-pandemic job.
“For both sexes, employment fell sharply in May 2020 by roughly 20 percentage points and recovered to almost pre-pandemic levels by November 2020. This provides a unique setting to analyze how attending a preferred school, by inducing higher educational attainment among females, might have differen- tially impacted the trajectory of employment for females and males.”
The conventional wisdom is born out by the IDB data that investing in education pays off. More importantly, the report suggested that people in general with better productivity were kept on over anything else, lending more credibility to the study not being gender biased or leaning towards a particular narrative.
The report also said, “There is a sharp drop in job loss right at the cutoff for women, while there is no such shift for men.
The regression estimates indicate that women who scored just above the admission threshold for a preferred school were 35.9 percentage points less likely to have lost a job between February 2020 and May, 2020, while males were 16.2 percentage points more likely to experience a job loss although the point estimate is statistically distinguishable from zero.
“The effects on job loss among women can account for roughly 55 percent of the employment effects during May 2020. The results are quantitatively and qualitatively similar when we use 2016 employment status as the baseline for computing job loss.
“Overall, the results suggest a causal role for education in reducing job loss; females who at- tended their preferred school achieved higher levels of education and were less likely to experience employment disruptions during the recession.
“The results also suggest that the differences in the impacts of attending a preferred school on employment during the recession are largely due to de- clines in job losses among more educated females and not due to different hiring practices during the recession.”