Labor Market MX — Participation

Modified

September 4, 2026

ENOE, INEGI · Quarterly, 2005–2026 · By sex, age, education, and state

Labor force participation broken down by sex, age group, education level, and state. None of these cuts uses a custom definition: every one is the same TPEA formula applied within each group, using fields the ENOE already reports pre-coded.

Overall

By breakdown

Time series

Full history for the breakdown above: every category on one chart. State is the exception — 32 overlapping lines aren’t readable — so there it’s one state at a time.

The gap between women and men, by age

Participation differs by sex more than by any other breakdown on this page. The gap is shown here as (men − women) / men, so it has no units and the age groups can share one chart. The line in ink is the national gap without the age split.

A narrowing gap looks the same whether women enter the labor force or men leave it. The chart below shows women’s participation on its own, by age group, so the two can be told apart.

Between 2005 and 2026 the national gap narrowed from 0.50 to 0.38, its lowest value in the series. In 2005 women’s participation was about half of men’s; in 2026-Q2 it is about 62% of men’s.

Most of that narrowing came from women entering the labor force. Among women aged 30 to 39, participation rose from 49.9% in 2005 to a peak of 63.4%; among those 50 to 59, from 39.3% to 53.2%. In every age group between 20 and 59, women’s participation reached its highest value between 2023-Q4 and 2025-Q4 and has been flat or slightly lower since.

The gap has kept narrowing after those peaks. In 2026-Q2 the groups 40 to 49, 50 to 59, and 60 and over, and the national series, all show their narrowest gap on record. Since each group’s peak in women’s participation, men’s participation has fallen in five of the six groups, in each case by more than women’s.

The youngest group is the exception. Among people aged 15 to 19 the gap is essentially where it was in 2005, at 0.50, while participation fell for both women, from 24.8% to 18.0%, and men, from 49.3% to 36.1%.

All series above are original, without seasonal adjustment.

How this is built

Same pipeline and same public repository as the overview page — see its “How this is built” section for the full description. The only difference here: the source data includes the demographic and state breakdowns, which the overview page’s national figures don’t need. The shaded band and error bars are a 95% confidence interval (±1.96 standard errors) from the ENOE’s complex survey design. For the gap by age, (men − women) / men, the interval comes from the delta method applied to the two survey estimates, treating men and women as independent domains; it is drawn as a band on the national line and shown in the tooltip for every series. The state breakdown uses the 32 state-level estimates the quarterly ENOE supports (unlike the monthly release). 2020-Q2 (the ETOE, a phone-based substitute survey run during the strictest pandemic lockdown) is excluded entirely from the series rather than shown as zero or interpolated — its methodology isn’t comparable to the regular ENOE, so it’s a genuine gap, not missing data.