Roma Women’s Unemployment in Hungary

This paper was written on behalf of the Roma Women’s Initiative (RWI) of the Open Society Institute Foundations, which has since been integrated to the Roma Initiatives program. It was part of RWI’s efforts to collect existing research evidence and data throughout the Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) region based on which policy recommendations in order to support Roma women’s participation in the labor market can be formulated at the national, regional, and European levels. Due to the lack of official ethnic data on Roma (and their employment), in most of the countries in the region – and thus, lack of gender-desegregated data – this evaluation of Roma women’s employment status relies on a review of existing research literature. Since such information tends to be available in pieces in national and local surveys, rather than in the few multi-country, or regional studies, the paper takes the example of Hungary, and is suggested to be read as a case study.