been representative of the existing stock of jobs. there have been low wage and high wage, lower skilled and higher skilled jobs created, but about average on both counts. the jobs growth has been in household services jobs such as health care, social assistance and, education, as well as in business services. twothirds of the employment growth over the past two years has been in full - time jobs. then i will look at wages growth and show that the lower average wage outcomes of the past few years have reflected the increased prevalence of wages growth in the 2s across the economy. finally, i will look forward and talk about the rba's forecasts for the labour market. two of the critical influences on that forecast are how much further labour supply will increase and how entrenched are wage outcomes. participation an increase in the number of people in employment can be met either by an increase in people entering from outside the labour market or a decline in unemployment. the increase in people coming from outside the labour force, causing an increase in the participation rate, is known as an ‘ encouraged worker ’ effect – when economic conditions improve, there is a tendency for people to enter or defer leaving the workforce. [ 3 ] historically more of the increase in employment has translated into a reduction in the unemployment rate than by a rise in the participation rate. however, the past couple of years have been unusual. the increase in employment has been met disproportionately by an increase in the number of people participating in the labour force ( graph 1 ). the share of the population participating in the labour force is at a record high. the two main groups contributing to this rise in participation are females and older workers. i will discuss each of these in turn and some of the forces driving the outcomes over both the recent past and from a longer perspective. an understanding of these forces can help us assess how much further these trends are likely to continue. https : / / www. rba. gov. au / speeches / 2019 / sp - dg - 2019 - 11 - 26. html 2 / 21 11 / 26 / 2019 employment and wages | speeches | rba graph 1 female participation female employment growth has accounted for two - thirds of employment growth over the past year. the female participation rate is now at its highest rate, and the gap between female and male participation is now the narrowest it has ever been ( graph 2 ). https : / / www. rba. gov.

trading can then be divided into manual, where instructions are executed by humans on an electronic trading platform, and automated, where instructions are executed by computer algorithms and there is little or no human intervention. the split here is about fifty - fifty. mind you, the landscape is changing at a high frequency! in the fx market, segmenting types of traders is difficult ; there is inevitably a lot of crossover in styles and blurring of boundaries. so for the purposes of our study, we split algorithmic ( algo ) trading into two categories : algo execution and algo decision - making. the former is when a trader uses an algo to execute an order, often used for large orders. the latter is where a model is used to initiate a trade based on parameters such as order book imbalance, momentum, correlations and systematic responses to economic news. it is in the latter camp that hft is located. hft firms generate their revenues from doing a large number of small - size, small - profit trades. they operate with low latency and their risk - holding period is very short, frequently less than one second. as speed is of the essence, indeed the defining characteristic of hft, co - location is important, that is locating the server that sends the order message as close as possible to the servers of the trading venue. however, our discussion with a number of participants in the market suggested that diminishing returns to speed have well and truly set in, such that the value of future gains may not be worth the investment cost. indeed, there was a general sense that hft was reaching a mature phase, where greater returns were more likely to be had from moving into new market segments rather than spending more on enhancing speed. 2 hft participants in fx tend to be located in three cities : chicago, new york and london, although the physical location of the server is more important than the physical location of the office. the bulk of trading volume appears to be accounted for by several large firms. most of the activity occurs on the inter - dealer electronic broking platforms ( reuters and ebs ) and the multi - bank electronic communication networks ( ecns, such as currenex, hotspot and fxall ). the various platforms have differing technologies, trading rules and trading parameters. for example, there are varying restrictions on quote life and fill ratios. this assumes, of course, that technology is not developed to let one trade faster than the speed of