Determinants of women unemployment: evidence from ethiopia (case of halabatown, snnpr)

Unemployment is a macroeconomic problem that affects people most directly and severely. Women constitute about half of the world’s population. Even though women’s employment has many social and economic importance, their employment in any sector is much lower than their counter part male. This study was aimed at identifying the major determinants of unemployment of women in Halaba Town. The data was collected by distributing questionnaires to a total of 385 women using stratified random sampling technique. Stratification technique was applied by grouping women by kebeles where they live. Out of the total of 385 women, 37.7% of them were unemployed. Descriptive statistics with the help of pie-charts, tables, and percentages were used in analyzing the collected data. In addition to this logistic regression model was employed to analyze the collected data. The Pearson chi-square test was also applied to see the significant association of dependent variable with independent variables. A total of twelve explanatory variables were included in the logistic regression. The result of binary logistic regression revealed that age, educational level of woman, family size, exposure to mass media, sex of household head, and marital status had significant effect on women unemployment. However, the variables presence of children under five years age, educational level of husband/partner, training, drug addiction, occupation of husband/partner, and freedom of decision making were found to be statistically insignificant. Government should give special attention to youngsters by providing them different job opportunities and the concerned bodies should also provide some sort of job-training for those women who are not or less educated.