Determinants of Women Unemployment in Ethiopia: A Multilevel Model Approach

Employment of women in economic activities has several beneficial effects for women and their families. The main objective of this study was to identify and describe the determinants of women unemployment in Ethiopia. The study is made based on the 2011 EDHS.To analyze the data; descriptive, logistic regression and multilevel model were used. The descriptive result revealed that about 64.4% of the women were unemployed while 35.6% were employed.The logistic regression was performed to investigate the effect of each predictor variables on the unemployment status of women. Accordingly,region,place of residence,age, marital status,exposure to any mass media,partner’s occupation, sex of household head,economic status of the household,educational level,and presence of child of age 5 years and less in the household were the significant determinants for unemployment.Moreover,multilevel modeling was used to analyze nested sources of variability within each level of the hierarchy.The estimates of this model show that those significant variables in logistic regression were also significant.The effect of these significant variables except mass media is the same for each region in Ethiopia.