Not All That It Seems: Narrowing of Gender Gaps in Employment During the Onset of COVID-19 in Indonesia

This paper studies the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on Indonesia’s labor market, using the exogenous timing of the pandemic in a seasonal difference-in-differences framework. We use multiple rounds of Indonesia’s National Labor Force Survey to establish a pre-pandemic employment trend and attribute any difference from this trend to the estimated effect of the pandemic on employment outcomes. We find mixed impacts of the pandemic on Indonesia’s labor market. While the pandemic has reduced the gender gap in employment participation due to the “added worker effect” among women, it has also lowered overall employment quality among both women and men. The increase in female employment was mainly driven by women in rural areas without a high school education entering either informal agricultural employment or unpaid family work. For men, the pandemic had negative employment impacts for all subgroups. Among the employed, both women and men work fewer hours and earn lower wages.