This Platform Tackles Labor Force Gender Divide with Female Only Job Recruitment

A new platform by Vintage Technologies looks to bridge the labor force gender divide by connecting employers with a female-only pool of recruits. Dubbed Emebet, an Amharic term that roughly translates to madam, the platform links female job seekers with both full-time and part-time employment across various sectors.

Vintage Technologies, which has developed several large-scale software projects for local and international firms, ended up developing the platform after exploring female labor recruitment through social media last year.

Soshi Furi, co-founder and CEO of the five-year-old software company, recalls starting the service with posts on Facebook in a bid to recruit women for housemaid and nanny gigs a year back. He quickly observed widespread demand for their service as calls for jobs in more formal sectors started flowing. The social media posts alone had provided nearly 250 jobs for women in less than a year.

“We decided to expand into a full-fledged platform because of customer requests,” Soshi told Shega.

Both prospective female job seekers and employers can register on Emebet using either email or phone number to access the service available on smartphones or computers. Once registered, a profile displaying the qualifications and experience of the job seeker will be available for selection by recruiters. Jobs will also be listed on the platform, where users can directly apply for specific positions.

For just one birr daily payment, job seekers can surf through the listings on Emebet, while recruiters will fork up monthly subscription fees of either 250 birr or annual charges of 1000 birr.

“We also allow free listings for a limited number of jobs,” the CEO says.

A recent report by the UN indicates that the unadjusted or raw gender pay gap in Ethiopia is 30.3% when considered at the hourly level and 35.1% when considered at the monthly level. Surprisingly, the gap exists for all levels of education but is highest, at 49.6%, for individuals with a primary-level education and lowest, at 16.4%, for individuals with a secondary-level education. There are also significant disparities in gender representation across various professions.

The team behind Emebet looks to set exemplary standards with its 50/50 gender composition of coders.

Bethelhem Mesgena, mobile application developer at Vintage, expects the pre-installed interview questions on the platform to simplify the recruitment process for employers. She hopes to see female job seekers become easily accessible for jobs on the platform.

“Emebet will be the number one tool for recruiting trained women for companies that care about women empowerment,” Betelhem told Shega.