Open research · ENOE

Gender gaps in the Mexican labor market

Twenty-one years of Mexico's official labor-force survey, ~34 million person-records, turned into gender-gap indicators for every state and every quarter: participation, pay, informality, and unpaid care, each with survey-design-correct uncertainty.

Open the dashboard Read the findings

0 vs 0women's vs men's participation, 2026Q1

0the participation gap in Chiapas alone

0 vs 4.1%out of the labor force due to unpaid care, women vs men

0 quarters2005–2026, harmonized into one series

The questionWhere, exactly, is the gap?

Mexico debates female participation policy with national averages. But the gaps that matter are local and structural: the difference between a woman's labor market in Chiapas and in Colima is larger than the difference between Mexico and most OECD countries. This project builds the missing measurement layer, so a policy team can see any state, any quarter, any indicator, and tell a real change from survey noise.

ExploreThe dashboard, live

Every indicator by state and quarter, with 95% confidence bands. Open full screen.

Finding 1Geography is the story

In 2026Q1, 31.4% of women in Chiapas participate in the labor force, against 80.8% of Chiapas men. Northern and coastal states run 20+ points higher for women. A national average hides most of the problem, and most of the policy opportunity.

Labor-force participation by sex and state, 2026Q1 — Participation by sex and state, 2026Q1. Error bars: 95% confidence intervals.

Finding 2A record with an asterisk

Female participation reached a series record of 46.5% in late 2023 and stands at 45.2% today, up from 39.9% in 2005. The shaded band marks the pandemic-era survey redesign: this pipeline flags it in every chart, so a real recovery can be separated from a measurement artifact. Men's participation has declined six points over the same two decades; the gap narrows from both ends.

National labor-force participation by sex, 2005 to 2026 — National participation by sex, 2005–2026, with the ENOE-N period marked.

Finding 3The engine of the gap is unpaid care

Among working-age people out of the labor force, 38.3% of women are out because of unpaid domestic work; for men the figure is 4.1%. Meanwhile informality is nearly identical by sex (55.3% vs 54.4%). Women are not in worse jobs than men so much as kept out of jobs entirely, which points policy at care infrastructure, not just labor-market rules.

Out of the labor force due to unpaid domestic work, by sex — Unpaid domestic work as the reason for being out of the labor force, by sex.

MethodBuilt to be checked

One command reproduces everything from INEGI's public microdata: 84 quarters harmonized across every survey redesign, estimates with Taylor-linearized variances honoring the survey design, and external validation that reproduces INEGI's official bulletin within rounding. No microdata are redistributed.

Honest caveats travel with the data: the 2020Q2 telephone survey is excluded, income non-response has risen from 19% to 33% and is published alongside every income estimate, and the care indicator is a documented proxy. Full detail in the repository.

ResumenEn español

Veintiún años de la ENOE convertidos en indicadores de brechas de género por entidad y trimestre. Tres hallazgos: la participación femenina tocó su récord (46.5% en 2023) y aún queda ~29 puntos debajo de la masculina; la geografía manda (Chiapas: 31.4% de las mujeres vs 80.8% de los hombres); y el mecanismo es el trabajo de cuidados no remunerado, la razón de inactividad del 38.3% de las mujeres fuera de la fuerza laboral, contra 4.1% de los hombres. Tablero interactivo · Código y metodología.