Jordan’s Female Workforce Gap Is Forcing a Rethink of Employment Policy

Jordan is developing a unified institutional mechanism to coordinate and monitor policies aimed at increasing women’s labour force participation, replacing a patchwork of separate initiatives with a national framework built around shared data, accountability and impact measurement. The shift matters because women’s economic participation remains far below men’s, making the effectiveness of employment, transport, care, skills and social-protection policies a wider economic issue rather than a narrowly defined labour-market programme.

Jordan is confronting a difficult reality in its push to bring more women into the workforce: having more initiatives does not necessarily mean achieving better labour-market outcomes. With women's economic participation at 14.5 per cent in the first quarter of 2025, compared with 51.2 per cent for men, the country is shifting attention from launching individual programmes to determining whether those interventions collectively move the national employment needle.

The Ministry of Labour, working with the International Labour Organization, GIZ and other national institutions, is developing a unified mechanism to coordinate programmes, share data, monitor results and measure impact. The ambition is significant because Jordan is effectively trying to replace a fragmented landscape of employment, skills, transport, care, social-protection and entrepreneurship initiatives with a system capable of showing what actually helps women enter and remain in the labour market.

Jordan's Problem Is No Longer a Shortage of Initiatives

More than 30 national institutions are already implementing programmes that directly or indirectly affect women's economic participation. Their activities stretch across employment, skills development, social protection, transport, the care economy, legislation, entrepreneurship and digital transformation, revealing just how widely responsibility for women's employment is distributed across government and partner institutions.

Women's participation in paid work is shaped by multiple constraints, so a narrow employment programme cannot address every obstacle. But when dozens of institutions pursue parallel interventions without a common system for measuring their contribution, governments can struggle to determine where programmes complement one another, where they overlap and where important gaps remain.

Jordan's proposed national mechanism is designed to tackle precisely this problem. Consultations led by the Ministry of Labour have moved toward establishing a national team with defined responsibilities for coordination, information exchange, programme monitoring and impact measurement, giving institutions a common platform rather than leaving each initiative to operate largely within its own administrative boundaries.

The shift is important because policy success can look very different depending on what is being measured. A programme may successfully train thousands of women or provide entrepreneurship support, yet still have limited influence on national labour force participation if beneficiaries cannot find suitable jobs, remain employed or overcome barriers such as transport and care responsibilities.

The 15 Per Cent Finding Exposes the Accountability Gap

Perhaps the most revealing result of Jordan's mapping exercise is that only 15 per cent of the initiatives reviewed were classified as having a direct impact on increasing women's labour force participation. Those interventions were concentrated around three pathways: direct employment, capacity building and sustaining women's participation in the labour market.

Policies affecting childcare, transportation, social protection, workplace conditions or entrepreneurship may influence employment indirectly and can be essential to removing barriers that prevent women from working, but the finding highlights how difficult it can be to connect broad economic-empowerment activity with a specific labour-market outcome.

The distinction is crucial for public policy because inputs and outcomes are not the same thing. Governments can count workshops, beneficiaries, training courses and projects relatively easily; establishing whether those activities change participation rates is much harder. Jordan's new approach seeks to build that missing connection by linking initiatives to national indicators and examining whether resources are producing measurable results.

The implication is potentially important for future spending decisions. If the mechanism can identify which interventions have the strongest relationship with women entering or remaining in employment, policymakers may be better positioned to concentrate resources where they have greater impact while redesigning programmes that duplicate existing efforts or fail to address major constraints.

Women's Employment Is Really a Transport, Care and Workplace Issue Too

One reason Jordan has struggled to turn multiple programmes into a higher participation rate is that women's access to work cannot be separated neatly from the wider systems surrounding employment. The national process identifies barriers involving decent job opportunities, skills, social protection, transportation, the care economy, early childhood services, workplace conditions, legislation, entrepreneurship and employment opportunities for women with disabilities.

This makes women's employment a cross-government issue rather than simply the responsibility of a labour ministry. Skills programmes may prepare women for vacancies, but training alone cannot solve difficulties reaching workplaces. Employment opportunities may exist, but participation can remain constrained if care responsibilities or working conditions make continued employment difficult.

The care economy is particularly illustrative of this wider policy challenge. Increasing women's employment depends not only on creating opportunities but also on whether women can realistically take and retain those jobs. Similar dynamics apply to transport, social protection and workplace regulations, meaning policies in seemingly separate areas can influence the same labour-market indicator.

This is why coordination matters more than bureaucratic neatness. A unified mechanism could allow institutions responsible for different barriers to understand how their interventions interact, making it easier to identify situations in which progress in one area is being undermined by constraints elsewhere.

Jordan's challenge, therefore, is not simply to design more employment programmes. It is to create a policy chain in which skills, transport, care, regulation and workplace support collectively make participation economically and practically viable.

The Real Test Is Whether Better Data Produces Better Decisions

Data sits at the centre of Jordan's emerging framework. Officials have focused on developing a common understanding of how labour force participation is calculated, ensuring that institutions use consistent statistical concepts and creating mechanisms through which information can be shared and interpreted across government.

This technical work may appear less visible than launching a new employment scheme, but it could prove more consequential. Without a common methodology, different institutions may measure progress differently, making it difficult to compare programmes or understand whether changes in participation reflect genuine labour-market improvements.

The proposed national team is intended to establish clear responsibilities, focal points, follow-up mechanisms and data-sharing arrangements. Recommendations from the consultation process also call for aligning programmes more closely with the national participation indicator, developing joint performance-monitoring mechanisms and reducing duplication across existing initiatives.

The harder question is what happens after the data identify weaknesses. Monitoring only becomes economically meaningful if institutions are willing and able to redirect resources, modify programmes and address barriers revealed by the evidence. A dashboard showing weak outcomes does not improve participation unless it changes policy decisions.

This makes accountability the crucial next stage. Success will depend not merely on establishing a national team but on whether its findings influence programme design, budgets, institutional priorities and the treatment of barriers that keep women outside employment.

Jordan's Economic Modernisation Vision aims to at least double women's economic participation while integrating more than one million young women and men into the labour market. That places women's employment within a much larger debate about growth, competitiveness, living standards and the country's ability to use its available human capital more effectively.

If the new mechanism succeeds, its most important contribution may be identifying the difference between activity and impact: not how many initiatives support women in principle, but which policies actually help more women secure decent work, remain economically active and contribute to the country's growth.