WP 92 - An overview of women's work and employment in Azerbaijan

M. van Klaveren, K.G. Tijdens, M. Hughie-Williams and N.E. Ramos Martin

were largely devoted to promoting the president, his government, and the ruling party. State-run AzTV, for
example, devoted 98% of its political coverage to the government, the presidential family, and the ruling
party, with just 2% left for opposing views (US Dept of State 2009, 2010). The Rapporteur of the Council
of Europe stated, related to the 2009 municipal elections, “De facto, television largely transmitted the image
of a single party system in Azerbaijan, where elections do not play an important role” (website Council of
Europe). In September 2009, a number of journalists came out in protest against, what they called, the as-
sault of the authorities on the free press; some blamed the lack of solidarity among journalists (NN 2009b).
A few weeks later, the chairman of the World Association of Newspapers voiced concern over the lack of
conditions for the promotion of strong and independent media in Azerbaijan (NN 2009c).

2.3. The sectoral labour market structure

2.3.1. Population and employment

As eludicated, the population of Azerbaijan in 2009 approached nine million. The recent urbanisation
rate is estimated at 52%, the rate of urbanisation for 2005-2010 at 1% annual change (CIA World Factbook;
WHO 2009). The capital, Baku, is by far the largest city, with in 2009 2,04 million inhabitants. The second
and third largest cities, Ganja and Sumqayit, currently have both about 310,000 inhabitants (wikipedia’s
Azerbaijan and Baku).

Table 2 presents the development of total employment as well as employment by status and gender
in Azerbaijan between 2003-2008, based on total population figures of respectively 8,27 million (2003)
and 8,73 million (2008). The table shows a modest growth in these years of total employment for males,
by 3.7%, and a very strong growth for females, by 606,000 persons or 43%. This obviously has largely to
do with changes in statistical observation and interpretation, leading to a drastic increase of own-account
and contributing family workers for both sexes but in particular for females; the statistically large creation
of employment has been questioned by domestic sources too (f.e. NN 2009a). According to the available
figures paid employment has substantially decreased for men, by 150,000 or 13%, while paid employment
for women showed a slight increase, by 5,000 or 0.7% (all data: ILO Laborsta). More detailed figures show
the continuous importance of government and state-owned enterprises for wage employment, especially of
women. They clarify that in 2008 24.6% of all women employed worked in government and state-owned
enterprises (men: 24.8%), only 7.0% in non-state enterprises (men: 16.1%), and 5.4% in other forms of paid

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