The gender gap in Malé’s labour market is often treated as a social issue, but the latest Labour Force Survey suggests something more structural: the capital’s economy is operating below capacity because a large share of its working-age women remain outside paid employment.
According to the Labour Force Survey, Malé 2024-2025, women account for a disproportionately large share of those excluded from the labour force. While 87.7% of working-age men were employed, the figure for women stood at 54.0%. The gap is even clearer among those outside the labour force, where women made up 43.8% of the working-age female population, compared with 10.8% among men.
This is not simply a matter of individual choice or job-seeking behaviour. The report shows that among women outside the labour force who were neither seeking work nor available for employment at the time of the survey, 49% identified household or family responsibilities as their main activity. For men in the same category, the figure was just 8%.
That difference points to an unseen economy operating beneath Malé’s formal labour market. Care work, household management, and family responsibilities remain largely unpaid, largely female, and largely excluded from economic planning. Yet they shape who can work, who can advance, and how much productive capacity the economy can actually mobilise.
The macroeconomic cost is visible in the survey’s labour underutilisation figures. Malé’s unemployment rate appears low at 2.3%, but this narrow measure hides a wider pool of people who are not fully engaged in paid work. The potential labour force stood at 6,269 people, nearly twice the number recorded as unemployed. Women made up 60.3% of this group.
This matters because the potential labour force represents people close to entering employment. They may not have searched for work recently, or may not be immediately available, but they remain a source of labour supply that could be activated under the right conditions. In a small economy with a narrow domestic labour base, that is not a marginal issue. It is an economic reserve that remains partly locked away.
The report also shows that broader labour underutilisation is far higher for women than for men. While the unemployment rate for women was 3.9%, the aggregate labour underutilisation rate for women reached 15.2%. For men, the equivalent figure was 5.0%. This suggests that the standard unemployment rate significantly understates the extent to which women’s labour is being underused.
For policymakers, the implication is direct. If care responsibilities keep women out of paid employment, then childcare, eldercare, flexible working arrangements, and family-support systems are not merely welfare policies. They are economic infrastructure. Just as roads, ports, housing, and digital systems enable markets to function, socialised care enables labour markets to function more efficiently.
Without that infrastructure, the economy carries an artificial ceiling. Employers face a smaller pool of local workers. Households lose potential income. The state forgoes tax revenue. National productivity is constrained not by a lack of people, but by the way care is distributed and undervalued.
This is especially relevant for Malé, where the cost of living is high and the economy depends heavily on services, administration, trade, transport, and construction. The survey shows that Maldivians are more concentrated in the tertiary sector, while foreigners account for a significant share of the employed population, particularly in private-sector work. At the same time, many Maldivian women remain outside paid employment, with care responsibilities absorbing time that could otherwise support household income and wider economic participation.
Treating this as a private domestic matter allows the problem to remain invisible. Treating it as a macroeconomic constraint changes the policy conversation. It shifts the question from whether women should work to whether the economy is organised in a way that allows them to do so.
The answer, based on the labour force data, is incomplete. Malé has a pool of working-age women who are either outside the labour force or underutilised, and a significant share of that exclusion is tied to unpaid family responsibilities. Unless that burden is addressed through institutional support, the economy will continue to rely on a model that excludes part of its own productive base.
The hidden cost of care is therefore not hidden because it is small. It is hidden because it has been normalised. For Malé’s economy, the price of that normalisation is lower output, weaker resilience, and a labour market that cannot fully draw on the people already within it.
