Gender disparities in Africa’s labor markets: a cross-country comparison using standardized survey data

Gender inequality in the labor market remains a pressing problem in contemporary Africa. Although there are large ariations across countries in male and female labor market outcomes, evidence shows that, in several countries of the region, women are less likely to be in paid jobs, and those that are employed are disproportionately concentrated in informal and precarious employment and paid substantially less than men (for example, Appleton, Hoddinott, and Krishnan 1999; Bigsten and Horton 1997; Brilleau, Roubaud, and Torelli 2004; ECA 2005; Glick and Roubaud 2004; ILO 2002; Lachaud 1997). While the lack of decent employment for both men and women is at the heart of the poverty battle in Africa, the fact that women experience greater diffi culties in the labor market is an additional concern and a specifi c poverty challenge. Women's employment and earnings are essential in the fi ght against poverty, not only because of the direct contribution they make to household welfare, but also because such employment provides personal power for women in making family decisions and redirecting household spending on essential needs, especially in favor of children's health and education (UNICEF 1999). Supporting employment for women is also instrumental in securing initial investment in girls' education. Assessing and comparing women's disadvantages in African labor markets remains a challenge, however. In-depth comparative analyses are lacking, largely because reliable and comparable comprehensive data have been scant and have the following limitations. First, when centralized databases do exist, they typically break down only a few basic labor market indicators by gender, whichyields incomplete information on the relative situations of men and women and does not allow comparison between indicators. A further problem is thatreported labor market indicators by gender are often not comparable across countries because they refer to different survey instruments with different concepts and measures of employment and earnings. Second, while ad hoc comparable survey instruments for several countries in Africa have been developed from time to time, they usually cover only urban areas or capital cities (Brilleau, Roubaud, and Torelli 2004; Lachaud 1997). Third, fairly good poverty and labor market data gathered from multi-topic household surveys that cover urban and rural areas do exist for a number of African countries, but until recently they were not easily comparable because of differences in survey instruments. The objective of this study is to help correct an important knowledge gap regarding gender disparities in Africa's labor markets. The study is novel in providing a comparative analysis based on standardized, nationally representative survey data for 18 countries. The data were extracted from multi-topic integrated household surveys conducted in the region around 2000 and recently harmonized as part of the World Bank Survey-based Harmonized Indicators Program (SHIP). The fundamental issue this study addresses is the extent to which women in Africa are disadvantaged in the labor market, and how this disparity might vary across countries. The research questions include: Are gender disparities in the labor market particularly pronounced? What is the nature of women's disadvantages? Is greater gender parity in education likely to result in improved and more equal labor market outcomes? This chapter is organized as follows. The next section presents the SHIP dataset and the concepts used to compute key labor market indicators. It also discusses comparability and measurement issues. An overview of gender disparities in labor market outcomes is provided in the third section. The fourth section discusses gender inequalities within employment in the sample countries. The role of educational attainment and gender inequalities in education is reviewed in the fifth section, and a summary section follows.