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Educator with children in Dortmund
Photo: Bernd Thissen / dpa
The shortage of skilled workers in the German economy mainly affects professions that are particularly gender-specific.
This is the result of an evaluation that the German Economic Institute (IW) in Cologne published on Friday on the occasion of International Women's Day.
The newspapers that formed the “Funke Media Group” had previously reported on it.
This is how the IW assessed the ten professional groups in which the most skilled workers were missing last year, all of which were either typically women's or men's jobs.
The institute defined such professions as those with a proportion of at least 70 percent women or men.
Most skilled workers were therefore missing from the typical female professions of child care and education as well as social work and social education.
In 2023 there were around 20,000 missing skilled workers.
There were slightly fewer, namely almost 18,000 vacancies, in the typical male profession of construction electrical engineering.
The jobs with the highest skills gap at a glance:
Educator (20,900)
Social work (19,800)
Construction electrics (17,800)
Health and nursing care (17,700)
Computer scientist (16,000)
Automotive specialist (15,400)
Elderly care (15,200)
Salesperson (12,900)
Electrical operating technology (12,900)
Electrical engineering (12,900)
According to the IW, it has only partially worked to make these professions more attractive to the opposite sex.
The proportion of female car mechanics has doubled since 2014, but is now only almost five percent.
In some professions that are typically female, the proportion of men is now decreasing again.
Accordingly, their share in social work has fallen by almost 2 percentage points since 2014.
However, the trend was reversed in health and nursing, where the proportion of men increased by over 2 percentage points.
In both professions, around a quarter of employees are male.
The IW evaluation can be found here.
beb/dpa