In 180 of the 182 economies the ILO models, men are likelier to be in the workforce than women — and how rich a country is barely predicts the gap; region does

Rank every economy the International Labour Organization models by income, and the share of women in the workforce barely follows the money. Rank them by region, and the pattern snaps into place. The ILO publishes a modelled labour-force participation rate — the share of the working-age population, 15 and older, that is either employed or actively looking for work — for men and women separately. The World Bank carries the two series as SL.TLF.CACT.MA.ZS and SL.TLF.CACT.FE.ZS, updated 13 July 2026, reference year 2024. These are modelled estimates: where a country lacks a recent labour-force survey, the ILO imputes the value. ^mmodeled We kept every economy with both a male and a female 2024 estimate — 182 in all — and subtracted one from the other. In 180 of the 182, the modelled male rate is higher. Women are estimated to out-participate men in only two: Burundi (79.7% to 77.2%) and Moldova, where the two rates are a statistical tie at 72.1–72.2%. The gap runs from Burundi's 2.5-point female lead to a 64.8-point male lead in Afghanistan, with a median of 14.1 points across the panel. ^mmodeled And the gap barely tracks how rich a country is — as the income-tier medians below show, it peaks in the middle of the income ladder, not at the poorest end.

The single vantage most desks would reach for — richer countries treat women better, so the gap should narrow as income climbs — does not hold across the panel. Sort the 182 economies into the World Bank's four income tiers and the median gap is 11.3 points in low-income economies, 15.1 in lower-middle, 19.4 in upper-middle, and back to 11.3 in high-income. It peaks in the middle and is identical at the two ends. ^mmodeled What sorts the panel is geography. The median gap is 48.5 points across the World Bank's Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan and Pakistan grouping and 36.2 across South Asia — three to four times the roughly 11-point median in Sub-Saharan Africa, Europe and Central Asia, and East Asia and the Pacific. Of the 20 widest gaps, 18 sit in one of those two regions, and they span every income tier: high-income Oman (58 points) and Saudi Arabia (50) stand beside low-income Afghanistan (65) and Yemen (57). Income does not tell them apart. ^mmodeled At the other end, the highest female participation rates on the panel belong to low- and lower-middle-income economies, mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa but not only — Madagascar (82.9%), Solomon Islands (82.3%), Nigeria (80.7%), Tanzania (80.3%) — where roughly four in five women are counted as economically active; the Solomon Islands, a lower-middle-income Pacific economy, sits second, and North Korea (77.7%) and Cambodia (77.3%) rank in the panel's top seven. That a cross-country pattern this strong tracks region rather than income is consistent with explanations built on social norms or the structure of local labour markets, but these two series test none of them: no norm, sector, law or wage variable is joined here. Region is where the gap sorts, not why. ^sspeculative

A participation rate counts anyone employed or seeking work; it is not a measure of choice, pay or job quality. The near-universal female participation in the poorest economies may owe much to subsistence agriculture, where not working is not an option — a widely-noted development pattern these two series cannot themselves confirm ^sspeculative; a high rate there is not the same as opportunity, and a lower rate in a richer country is not automatically exclusion by preference. The estimates are modelled, so small gaps — Moldova's near-tie, a point here or there — sit inside the noise, and the gap's weak, non-monotonic tracking of income across the panel does not rule out income mattering within a given region, or within one country over time. The gap is a single number: it is silent on hours, informality, and the child-rearing penalty ILO data show widens the participation gap sharply once a young child is in the home. ^mmodeled

**View from a Gulf labour ministry:** a high-income economy can carry one of the world's widest gaps — Oman near 58 points, Saudi Arabia near 50 — because oil-era earnings and a male-breadwinner norm can hold measured female participation low even as income rises; whether that is what these numbers show, or something else, the two series cannot resolve. ^sspeculative **View from a subsistence-farming economy:** where nearly four in five women are counted as active, the rate reflects necessity as much as access — and were that economy to grow, the measured rate could fall before it climbs again, the U-shaped path economists have long described. The same modelled series reads honestly from both chairs; neither reading is one it can settle. ^sspeculative