The Gender Unemployment Gap: How the 2008–2009 Economic Crisis in Ecuador Differentially Affected Women

This paper uses panel data to assess how the 2008–2009 economic crisis affected the unemployment rates of Ecuadorian men and women differently. After controlling for individual characteristics, the results of a difference-in-differences model and individual and household fixed effects models indicate that women were one to two percentage points more likely than men to be unemployed during the economic crisis in Ecuador. This paper concludes, therefore, that the economic crisis negatively affected women more than men even after controlling for observed and unobserved time-invariant individual characteristics.