March 21, 2023
The head executive of a regional recruitment service said Dominican women appear to be “winning” Women’s History Month as the Ministry of Industry and Commerce (MIC) recently found that women are out-earning men by nearly RD$5,200. However, he said while this is a promising sign in favour of equality, there’s still more work to be done to help empower women to enter roles they have been traditionally shut out of.
“The MIC’s report is a great way to mark Women’s History Month,” said Joseph Boll, Caribbean Employment Services Inc. CEO. Caribbean Employment Services Inc. is a market-leading digital talent acquisition service that aims to connect the top talent from the Caribbean with hiring managers, HR professionals and decision-makers in companies both within the Caribbean as well as abroad. Further, it aims to provide the region’s jobseekers and those who are already employed with news and resources related to Caribbean labour.
Boll continued, “What better way to honour the progress made by women than seeing how they’ve gone from being barred from the labour force to now earning enough to provide for their families, even slightly better than men are. It certainly shows the strides Dominican women are making in shining brightly in the workplace.”
In fact, the Dominican Republic’s statistics in this respect are the opposite of the norm in many other countries around the world, where men typically earn more than women and are typically in managerial or other high-earning positions in greater numbers than women are. Global labour organizations have also found that, in general, fewer women are participating in the workforce than men after the COVID-19 pandemic. This had been the case even before the pandemic struck, but the disparity grew even more amid the crisis.
As such, Caribbean Employment says the fact that Dominican women are earning more in general, and that some 70 percent are employed in large industries, is certainly reason to celebrate. However, the group’s CEO said more could be done, as just 23 percent of industrial manufacturing workers in the country are women. He renewed calls for businesses and governments to make more of an effort to empower women to join traditionally male-dominated fields like industrial manufacturing, oil and gas, renewable energy, STEM and more.