Growth Helps, Joblessness Hurts: The Economics Behind Jordan’s Gender Gap

Jordan's struggle with gender inequality is often framed through social norms, workplace barriers and women's limited access to economic opportunities. A new study argues that the problem must also be understood through the broader economy, showing that growth, inflation and unemployment are closely associated with how gender inequality evolves over time.

The study, "Economic Uncertainty and Gender Gap in Jordan: Macroeconomic Perspective," by Yaseen M. Altarawneh and Saeed Mahmoud Altarawneh of the University of Jordan, was published in the journal Economies in August 2026. Using annual data from 1990 to 2025, the researchers examine whether economic growth, inflation, unemployment and global uncertainty are linked to Jordan's Gender Inequality Index, or GII.

The findings offer a more complex picture than the conventional claim that global economic uncertainty automatically worsens gender disparities. Domestic economic conditions appear far more consequential: stronger growth is associated with lower gender inequality over the long run, while higher inflation and unemployment are associated with wider disparities.

Growth Can Reduce Inequality, But Only If Women Share in the Gains

According to the study, economic growth is associated with declining gender inequality in Jordan. The estimated long-run coefficient for economic growth is negative and statistically significant, suggesting that improvements in economic performance can coincide with better gender outcomes through employment opportunities, income generation and broader access to productive resources. By contrast, inflation and unemployment carry positive and statistically significant coefficients, linking deteriorating economic conditions with greater gender inequality.

This relationship carries an important warning for development policy: headline GDP growth is not enough. Growth matters for gender equality when it expands opportunities in sectors where women can participate, reduces barriers to employment and improves access to income and economic security. If expansion remains concentrated in industries, occupations or employment arrangements that largely exclude women, stronger national growth may deliver only limited progress toward economic inclusion.

Jordan's labor-market structure makes that distinction especially important. The study notes that women continue to face substantially higher unemployment than men and comparatively low labor-force participation despite improvements in education. Structural constraints, vulnerable forms of employment and unequal care responsibilities can leave women more exposed when employers reduce hiring or households face greater economic pressure.

For policymakers, the implication is that gender equality cannot be left to "trickle down" from economic expansion. Growth strategies need to be judged partly by whether they generate viable pathways into employment for women, including through entrepreneurship, private-sector hiring, flexible work, skills development and institutional reforms that reduce barriers to participation. The study consequently strengthens the case for treating women's economic inclusion as part of growth policy rather than as a separate social-policy agenda.

Inflation and Joblessness Are Also Gender Policy Issues

The research is particularly relevant at a time when governments across developing economies are confronting the distributional consequences of inflation and labor-market weakness. In Jordan, the study finds that inflation has a statistically significant positive long-run association with gender inequality, with a coefficient of 0.006339, while unemployment shows a positive coefficient of 0.003557. The authors interpret these relationships as evidence that economic stress can disproportionately affect women, especially those facing weaker labor-market attachment or limited social protection.

The significance extends beyond Jordan. Inflation is frequently discussed as a question of monetary policy, purchasing power and macroeconomic stability, but its social effects are rarely gender-neutral. Rising food, transport, housing and household costs can intensify pressure on people with lower or less secure incomes, while employment contractions can deepen disadvantages among groups already underrepresented in formal labor markets.

Unemployment creates a similar risk. Where women face structural barriers to recruitment, advancement or re-entry into employment, an economy with insufficient job creation can reinforce existing disparities rather than distribute hardship evenly. The study notes that women's labor-market recovery after economic shocks can be slower, meaning that temporary downturns may produce consequences that persist even after broader indicators begin to improve.

This makes social protection and employment policy central to gender strategy. Measures that protect household purchasing power, expand quality jobs, support women-led businesses and strengthen access to formal employment can function simultaneously as economic stabilization tools and gender-equality interventions. For development agencies and multilateral institutions, the findings also argue for incorporating gender distributional analysis into macroeconomic and labor-market programs rather than assessing economic reforms only through aggregate outcomes.

Global Uncertainty Matters Less Directly Than Domestic Transmission Channels

One of the more striking findings concerns the World Uncertainty Index. While global uncertainty is often assumed to worsen inequality by depressing investment, jobs and household confidence, the study does not find a statistically significant direct long-run relationship between the WUI and gender inequality in Jordan. The coefficient is positive, but its p-value of 0.2616 means the estimated relationship does not meet conventional thresholds for statistical significance.

The finding suggests that what ultimately matters may be how those shocks travel through domestic institutions and markets. Global uncertainty could affect women indirectly by weakening investment, raising prices, reducing hiring or intensifying fiscal pressure, but the study does not directly model those transmission channels.

External shocks often receive considerable policy attention, yet their development impact is shaped by domestic economic structures, labor-market institutions and social protection systems. Two economies may face the same global disruption but experience very different gender consequences depending on women's employment patterns, access to savings and finance, institutional protections and the responsiveness of public policy.

The short-run results reinforce this complexity. Economic growth, inflation, lagged unemployment and lagged global uncertainty show different short-term relationships from their longer-run patterns, while the statistically significant error-correction term indicates that roughly 81% of deviations from the long-run equilibrium are corrected within one annual period. In practical terms, temporary movements should not automatically be interpreted as lasting structural change; policies need to distinguish immediate shock management from long-term reform.

Gender Equality Belongs at the Center of Economic Policy

Methodologically, the study uses an autoregressive distributed lag, or ARDL, framework suited to relatively small time-series datasets containing variables with different statistical properties. The bounds test produces an F-statistic of 14.84970, above the upper critical value even at the 1% level, supporting the existence of a long-run relationship among the variables. Diagnostic tests also report no major problems involving residual normality, serial correlation or heteroskedasticity, while stability tests remain within conventional critical bounds.

There are nevertheless important reasons for caution. The annual dataset is small, and although the study period includes major episodes such as the global financial crisis, Arab Spring, Syrian refugee crisis, COVID-19 pandemic and recent inflationary pressures, the baseline model does not explicitly incorporate structural breaks. The authors acknowledge that unobserved changes may influence the estimated relationships, meaning the findings establish association rather than definitive causality.

The use of the composite GII also limits how precisely the results can identify the channels involved. Because the index combines reproductive health, empowerment and labor-market participation, future research should examine whether inflation and unemployment primarily affect women through jobs and incomes or whether their influence extends into health, political representation and other dimensions. More granular sectoral, regional and household-level data could also reveal which groups of women are most exposed.