1.1 Taking up and giving up wage employment

3Throughout the past centuries, Ethiopian women have provided a large share of wage workers. In many cases, women have taken up wage labour because of economic compulsion. In other cases, pull factors such as the extra income generated have been the reason for women turning to wage labour. Although Ethiopian women’s labour has been devalued in general, the mere appearance of a concrete, payable wage made the direct value—often hidden within the household unit and agrarian relations—of female labour evident, and has thus provided a potential source of empowerment.

4However, Ethiopian women have often been expected to give up wage work when starting a family. For this reason, until the late 1970s at least, it was assumed that the majority of waged working women were either unmarried, separated or widowed. Although the situation was already evolving at that time, up to this day, a sizeable number of women still withdraw from the job market upon marrying or having children.

5More recently, labour migratory flows have resulted in a situation where many young women take up temporary employment while waiting for better-paid opportunities abroad. Because of low wages, other exit strategies from wage labour have also become increasingly attractive, including the prospect of engaging in self-employment and micro-entrepreneurial activities.

1.2 Main areas of wage work

6A major sector in which female wage labour was deployed early on is domestic work. From the first decades of the 20th century onwards, female servants in urban and semi-urban areas—many of them having migrated from surrounding rural areas—have often been employed and paid by the month. Since then, the number of waged domestic workers has multiplied with the increase in the urban population. In rural areas, it has been rarer for domestic work to be compensated with wages.

7Women’s work has, by no means, been confined to the household. In hotel and restaurant businesses for instance, female workers have consistently predominated, outnumbering males by a ratio of between three and four since the 1970s. Other forms of food production, including bakery businesses, have also provided an outlet for female labour.

8The development of a bureaucracy and of office work has opened up new opportunities for working women. They have become predominant in many categories of support staff. Over the decades, and with the expansion of education opportunities for women, they have taken over more and more professionally and technically demanding tasks originally reserved for men, and also joined the teaching profession in large numbers.

9Caregiving is another sector in which female labour has been important. In hospitals, nurses have tended to be women, while the better-paid and more prestigious occupations, like that of medical doctor, have remained, initially at least, in the realm of men.

10Many women have also been employed within the trade and transport sectors. Women worked as porters within large trading parties operating the long-distance trade routes of salt and other goods in the early 20th century. Such trade was eventually undermined by the coming of motor transport. But many women subsequently went to work in the offices and outlets of trading and transportation companies, though only rarely operating the vehicles. Although railway work was almost exclusively a male domain, air hostesses have exclusively been women.

11Another sector in which female workers have historically constituted and continue to constitute a majority is the important textile manufacturing sector. Together with food and beverages, since the early 1960s this sector has been one of the largest manufacturing sectors in Ethiopia, both in terms of output and employment.

12Women workers have also been employed on commercial farms and plantations, although male labour has generally dominated in this sector. However, in the horticultural subsector of commercial farming—buoyant since the early 2000s—around three-quarters of the workers are women.

13Women have thus provided the bedrock of what is arguably Ethiopia’s two most important waged commodity-producing sectors—textiles and horticulture—in addition to staffing a large part of the service sector.

14In none of these sectors, however, has the contribution of female labour been matched by representation in management, which has largely been a male affair. Although the situation may slowly be changing in this regard, male management remains the general rule, even in sectors where male workers are few.

2.1 Pay

16In terms of pay, women have consistently been discriminated against. This is true whether one speaks of service, office, factory, or plantation work. One aspect of this is that women have occupied better-paid technical and managerial positions less frequently than men. But they have also been consistently paid less when performing comparable work. The result has been a persistent gender pay gap, which has varied only in degree over different historical periods.

17Until the 1960s, the gender pay gap within an institution was sometimes as wide as by a factor of three or four. But in later imperial times, several tendencies contributed to narrowing the gap. These included the expansion of education opportunities open to women, and the concomitant increase in the recruitment of women to qualified positions. During the first republican period, wage-levelling measures decreased to a significant degree, gender discrimination in terms of pay.

18Since there is no national data on the gender wage gap, the historical fluctuations are illustrated with an example from the Bahir Dar Textile Factory. The following chart shows the mean wage differential in a randomised sample of 800 workers from the factory. Whether the trends displayed hold true for other workplaces and sectors, and whether the indication of a recent re-emergence of a widening gap constitutes a general trend, is something that future research may look into.

Figure 22. Gender Wage Differential at the Bahr Dar Textile Factory

2.2 Rights and conditions

19Until the 1963 Labour Law was passed, women workers enjoyed no codified labour rights. Even since then, the legal regime has displayed a consistent gender bias. At the most fundamental level, this has meant that none of the consecutive general labour laws has covered employment in the sector where the share of female employees is the highest: domestic work.

20But even women working in sectors that have been covered by labour legislation have found the laws and their enforcement insufficient. Poor employment security has been an issue that has persistently afflicted Ethiopian wage workers in general, and childbearing has frequently triggered women’s dismissal, despite legal stipulations. Even a high-end institution such as the national airline has been known to craft contracts in such a way that pregnancy may constitute a reason for termination of employment. For the workers employed in textile factories in the 1960s, or in small-scale bakeries where unionisation was not likely to be tolerated, the managerial prerogative in deciding such issues ruled even more supreme. Partly as a result of these factors, it has been claimed that women workers have been disproportionally affected by retrenchments. For example, those that followed deregulation and privatisation in the early 1990s.

21Workers being forced to engage in dangerous activities, lacking even the most basic protection and sanitation, and where there has been failure to enforce even minimum standards are other problems that have been rife in the Ethiopian waged labour market in general, and which have affected childbearing women preponderantly.

22But women workers have also been subjected to outright extrajudicial measures. In relatively new sectors too, old ills have reappeared. It has, for example, been documented, that female workers in the horticultural sector have been subjected to physical assault and sexual harassment.