The share of women in the labour market globally is not increasing even though most females want paid work, according to a major report on employment trends. Social norms of what a woman's role should be, as well as practical obstacles such as a lack of childcare and transport to get to work are holding women back, the International Labour Organization (ILO) said. Nearly half of the world's working age women have a job or are looking for one, compared to 76 percent of men, a gap that has hardly narrowed in the past decade and is not expected to change between now and 2021, the U.N. agency said in an annual report on women's employment trends late on Wednesday. "Women have trouble accessing the labour market in the first instance but when they do enter it they have more difficulty in finding a job," Steven Tobin, a lead author of the report, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

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