Employment still hasn’t recovered to levels that prevailed before the global financial crisis hit, according to new data from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

The Paris-based OECD said that area employment rate – defined as the proportion of working age people (aged 15 to 64) who are employed – was 64.9% in the first quarter of 2012. And, it notes, this figure is 1.6 percentage points lower than the 66.5% recorded in the second quarter of 2008, immediately preceding the onset of the global financial crisis.

The same gap prevails in Canada. The OECD reports that the employment rate for Canada is currently 72.0%, down from 73.6% in 2008, although this represents an improvement from the 71.5% recorded in 2009 and 2010.

There were 528 million people employed in the OECD area in the first quarter of 2012, which is two million below the level observed in the second quarter of 2008.

The group says that in virtually all OECD countries, the job crisis continues to affect men more severely than women, and young people (aged 15 to 24) more than prime age workers (those aged 25 to 54). Since the onset of the crisis, the employment rate for the OECD area has declined by 2.7 percentage points for men and by only 0.7 percentage points for women, it reports. However, the rate for men, at 73.0%, remains 16.1 percentage points higher than that for women, at 56.9%. For youth, the employment rate (at 39.1%) has contracted by 3.7 percentage points compared to a 1.6 percentage points fall for prime age workers (75.6%).

There have been large disparities in the evolution of employment rates across OECD countries since the start of the crisis, it also reports. Since the second quarter of 2008, the employment rate has declined most, by eight percentage points or more, in Greece, Ireland, and Spain. Only in Chile, Germany and Turkey are employment rates significantly higher today than at the onset of the crisis.