Thai Women Out-Study Men, Yet Four in Ten Remain Outside the Workforce, UN Report Finds

 

A UN profile says women’s workforce participation has barely moved in two decades, as unpaid care and an ageing population weigh on Thai growth.

 

Thai women are better educated than Thai men, yet far fewer of them are in the workforce. On the latest figures, 58.9% of women aged 15 to 64 take part in the labour market, against 74.7% of men. That is a gap of nearly 16 percentage points, and it has barely moved in two decades.

 

The finding comes from the Thailand Country Gender Equality Profile 2026, launched on Tuesday at Sustainability Expo 2026 (SX2026) in Bangkok.

 

UN Women, the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) and the UN Resident Coordinator’s Office produced it with the Ministry of Social Development and Human Security.

 

The report’s message for business and policymakers is blunt. Thailand has built the human capital but not the support that lets women use it. As the country ages and aims to become a high-income economy, that unused talent is an economic problem, not only a social one.

 

Somchai Yensabai, country programme coordinator at UN Women Thailand and chair of the UN Gender Theme Group, presented the findings.

 

“The crucial question today is not whether Thailand has gender equality policies, but whether those policies, combined with real practice, let every woman and girl benefit equally,” he said in Thai.

 

 

 

Top of the class, but outside the workforce Girls’ enrolment in primary, secondary and university education now matches or beats boys’. In 2024, 51.6% of women in the relevant age group were enrolled in higher education, against 38.6% of men.

 

Women also live longer, at 81 years against 72 for men, helped by universal health coverage in place since 2002. The payoff at work is weaker. Women earn about 6% less than men with similar qualifications, a small gap by global standards, helped by legal protection for equal pay.

 

But women are concentrated in lower-paid occupations. Somchai said education gains are not fully reflected in the labour market. Women are only 28.9% of graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, fields he described as key drivers of future growth.

 

Women make up 38% of managers, and 33.4% of firms are majority-owned by women, although women are 40.5% of newly registered entrepreneurs.

 

 

The unpaid care wall

The report’s main explanation is unpaid care work. Among working-age women who have left the labour market, 87.3% give unpaid domestic work as the reason, compared with 16.3% of men, according to 2019 data.

 

Women spend 3.2 times as long as men on unpaid care and housework. The report puts the value of women’s unpaid care at about 4.2% of GDP, against 1.3% for men.

 

Public services only partly fill the gap. Thailand offers 120 days of paid maternity leave and bars dismissal for pregnancy, but the government provides no assisted childcare for children under three.

 

Estimates from 2022 suggest at least 30% of children who should be covered by childcare are not. Elder care is short of staff and facilities, so wives and daughters provide most of it.

 

 

Social attitudes add to the pressure: in a survey, more than one in three Thais agreed that a pre-school child suffers when the mother works.

 

 

 

An ageing society raises the stakes

Thailand has become a fully aged society, with about one in five people over 60. More than one in three are projected to be over 60 by 2037, and the country could need up to 250,000 more paid care workers. The report treats care as both a barrier and an opportunity.

 

It cites International Labour Organization simulations showing that if Thailand invested in paid leave, early childhood care and long-term care, women would take 83% of the new jobs created, and 82% of those would be formal. Decent care jobs, it argues, are decent jobs for women, who make up most care workers.

 

 

Leadership and protection gaps persist

Women hold 19.8% of House seats and 22.5% of Senate seats after the February 2026 elections. Somchai noted the House figure is still far from Thailand’s 30% target, and women hold no more than about 10% of senior local executive posts. Only two of Thailand’s 32 prime ministers have been women.

 

He also pointed to gaps in social protection. About 61% of the population receives protection beyond health care, but the challenge, he said, is extending it to migrant workers and other vulnerable groups. The report adds that 32.9% of ever-partnered women aged 15 to 49 have experienced physical or sexual violence from an intimate partner.

 

 

Policy and business fixes

A panel moderated by UN Women regional goodwill ambassador Cindy Sirinya Bishop looked at what government, big business and small firms can do.

 

Kurupin Singnoi of the Department of Women’s Affairs and Family Development said the government is working on “time for family” leave. It would give all workers, men included, the right to take leave to care for relatives.

 

The National Family Policy and Strategy Committee, chaired by a deputy prime minister, has approved the measure. Talks continue with the Office of the Prime Minister on civil service rules and with the Labour Ministry on the private sector. She also pledged to push gender-responsive budgeting and caregiver training.

 

 

Siriporn Dechsing, a senior sustainability executive at retailer CP Axtra, said opening supply chains to women is good business, not just corporate social responsibility. Women now own about 51% of its suppliers, and the company aims to reach 60% this year.

 

An online platform lets women who cannot easily travel to Bangkok pitch products in the evening. More than 1,700 suppliers have joined, about half of them owned by women. Every Makro and Lotus’s branch has a room for staff to express and store breast milk, and women now work in fleet management, once a male preserve.

 

 

Wittawat Lamsam, assistant director-general of the Office of Small and Medium Enterprises Promotion (OSMEP), said Thailand’s ranking on social factors, including women, slipped in an ASEAN small-business index partly for lack of data.

 

A definition of women entrepreneurs, used since 2025, is now being applied. Banks with environmental, social and governance targets could use it to set lending goals. Women’s issues are also written into the next five-year SME master plan.

 

 

What the UN wants next

Nyaradzayi Gumbonzvanda of Zimbabwe, UN Assistant Secretary-General and UN Women Deputy Executive Director for Normative Support, UN System Coordination and Programme Results, said Thailand has “built a substantial legal and policy framework for gender equality”.

 

The test now, she said, is whether women in all their diversity can exercise their rights, take decisions equally and live free of violence. She said the profile’s analysis of power relations and social norms lets the UN move “from describing inequality to addressing its root causes”.

 

She hoped the findings would shape budgets and legislation, including through gender-responsive budgeting. She also wants them built into the Thailand-UN Cooperation Framework for 2027 to 2031 “from day one – not as an annex, not as an anecdote”.

 

 

UN Resident Coordinator Michaela Friberg-Storey said Thailand’s education and health records show what sustained public investment can achieve and that the labour-market gap needs government, business and civil society to work together.

 

The report’s recommendations include affordable childcare for under-threes, more elder care, paid paternity leave equal to maternity leave, wider access to credit for women entrepreneurs, and more women in formal and higher-paid work.

 

Closing the panel, the moderator said women’s economic empowerment needs four pieces to fit together: state-backed care systems, supply chains open to women, flexible workplaces, and data that proves what works.