Forests employ at least 42 million people worldwide, representing roughly 1.2 per cent of total global employment, yet women account for just 25 per cent of that workforce, with the widest gender gap of any region recorded in Europe. That is according to a joint research project commissioned by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Labour Organization (ILO), and Germany’s Thünen Institute of Forestry, published through the FAO’s open knowledge repository: Updated Methodology to Quantify Forest-Sector Employment: Global and Regional Estimates.
The paper draws on annual data from 182 countries representing 99 per cent of the world’s forest area to close longstanding data gaps in forest-sector employment between 2011 and 2022, and marks the first time global sex-disaggregated employment estimates have been produced for the sector, finding that women account for approximately 10.6 million of those 42 million jobs — a share the researchers say masks significant regional variation, with Europe recording the starkest imbalance of any geography covered.
Zhimin Wu, FAO Assistant Director-General and Forestry Division Director, said the study reflects a critical gap in how the sector has historically tracked its own workforce, adding that “internationally comparable data on employment in the sector is essential for creating policies that protect both people and forests.”
Surprisingly, Europe is home to the greatest gender gap
The gap is sharpest in Europe, where 1.8 per cent of men and only 0.5 per cent of women were employed in the forest sector in 2022, a disparity that no other region in the study approaches. Africa, the Americas, and Asia all recorded narrower differences between male and female employment shares, though the researchers stop short of attributing specific causes to regional conditions.
Total forest-sector employment fell by approximately 3.1 per cent between 2011 and 2022, with Asia holding the largest regional share at around 1.4 per cent of total employment throughout the period. Europe edged down from 1.3 per cent to 1.2 per cent across the same years, whilst Africa fluctuated, peaking in 2016 before retreating to 1.0 per cent by 2022, and the Americas held at approximately 0.8 per cent, with minor disruption during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Those estimates were built using the newly created Forest EMployment (FEM) model, which replaces three-year interval snapshots with annual data and draws on country-specific labour-market, socioeconomic, and demographic variables to address gaps in national reporting. Developed under the framework of FAO’s Global Forest Resources Assessment 2025 with European Union support, the model spans the full value chain, covering forestry and logging, wood and wood product manufacturing, and pulp and paper.
Wood and wood product manufacturing accounts for the largest single slice of those 42 million jobs at approximately 58 per cent of the total, and Wu said the FEM model now provides policymakers with the first annual, sex-disaggregated employment baseline ever produced across 182 countries, giving the sector the evidence it needs to act on the disparities the data has made visible for the first time.
