Gender, Education and Occupational Outcomes: Kenya`s Informal Sector in the 1990s

In this paper we examine the consequences of the increasing informalisation of the Kenyan economy in the 1990s for the gender gap in occupational outcomes. We use a labour force survey for Kenya undertaken at the end of the 1990s to ask whether education acts to increase women`s labour force participation and how both education and experience impact on the choices across the formal and informal sectors. We find that while labour force participation does rise with education it was higher for women than for men at the end of the 1990s. There are major differences between the public and formal private sectors. At very high levels of education women are more likely than men to have a public sector job. In contrast for the private formal sector, while education does raise the probability of having such a job, the gap between women and men widens as educational levels increase. At eight years of education, the end of primary school in Kenya, women are 10 percentage points less likely to have an informal private sector job than are men and are 22 percentage points more likely to be an unpaid family worker. Clearly an expansion of private sector activity will not lessen the gender gap unless this pattern is altered. We have no evidence that the gap between men and women falls as length in the workforce increases. Indeed in what we think is the most important category for explaining poor female labour market outcomes, unpaid family labour, the gap widens substantially over 10 to 20 years of work experience.