Working Paper
Gender, Islam, and law
This paper considers arguments about Islam and women’s welfare, and, at greater length, how legal systems with Islamic elements treat women, with a focus on how women fare in Islamic family courts. Key methodological issues include how to focus on...
Working Paper
Gender and bargaining
We study gender differences in bilateral bargaining using an artefactual field experiment in rural Uganda, through variation in gender composition of bargaining pairs and in disclosure of identities. Disagreement is common independently of disclosure...
Working Paper
Health consequences of sterilizations
One-third of married women are sterilized in India. This is largely due to family planning programs that put a strong emphasis on ‘permanent’ contraceptive methods rather than temporary ones. However, little is known about potential adverse effects...
Working Paper
The donor footprint and gender gaps
In this paper we analyse the impact of foreign aid on gender outcomes and attitudes. We do this by matching geocoded household surveys with aid projects. This offers a middle way between project evaluations and aggregated cross-country comparisons...
Working Paper
Are caste categories misleading?
This paper examines the relationship between caste and gender inequality in three states in India. When households are grouped using conventional, government-defined categories of caste we find patterns that are consistent with existing literature...
Working Paper
The differential impact of economic crisis on men and women, and its connection to intra-household bargaining
This paper discusses whether the Asian financial crisis affected men and women differently in Indonesia by estimating the effect of district consumption shock during the crisis on changes in men’s and women’s working status and assets. I found that...
Working Paper
Eradicating women-hurting customs
Social engineering refers to deliberate attempts, often under the form of legislative moves, to promote changes in customs and norms that hurt the interests of marginalized population groups. This paper explores the analytical conditions under which...
Working Paper
Explaining gender differences in preference for self-employment among tertiary graduates in Ghana
We examine gender differences in ambitions and expectations of jobseekers concerning self-employment, an increasingly proposed option for youth in economies with limited wage employment. Analysing survey data on 2,036 tertiary graduates in Ghana, we...
Working Paper
The effect of China’s One Child Policy on sex selection, family size, and the school enrolment of daughters
I first document that the introduction of the One Child Policy dramatically increased sex selection in certain regions, and that the Chinese government responded to this by allowing parents who had a daughter as their first child to try for a second...
Journal Article
Discrimination, Social Capital, and Financial Constraints
This paper examines the relationship among gender, social capital, and access to finance of micro, small, and medium enterprises in the manufacturing sector in Viet Nam. Our dataset is from the 2011, 2013, and 2015 results of the Micro, Small, and...
Working Paper
Why do women co-operate more in women’s groups?
We examine a public goods game in 83 communities in northern Liberia. Women contributed substantially more to a small-scale development project when playing with other women than in mixed-gender groups, where they contributed at about the same levels...
Working Paper
Breaking the metal ceiling
Occupational segregation significantly contributes to the earnings gender gap worldwide. We look at differences in outcomes for male and female enterprises and their sectors in Sub-Saharan Africa, a region of high female participation in...
Working Paper
Impact of school feeding programmes on educational outcomes
Food for Education (FFE) programmes have been implemented in developing countries since the 1960s. This paper examines the impact of the Catholic Relief Services (CRS) school feeding programme on pupils’ attendance and girls’ enrolment rate within...
Working Paper
Occupational gender segregation in post-apartheid South Africa
In this paper, I show that occupations in South Africa are segregated and stratified not only by race, but also by gender. While some women (mostly black and Coloured) overwhelmingly fill low-paying jobs, others (mostly white and Indian/Asian but...
Working Paper
Maternal mortality and women’s political participation
Raising women’s political participation leads to faster maternal mortality decline. We estimate that the introduction of quotas for women in parliament results in a 9–12 per cent decline in maternal mortality. In terms of mechanisms, it also leads to...
Working Paper
Changing male perceptions of gender equality
Reducing gender inequality is a critically important development challenge, especially in countries with widespread and deep-rooted prejudices against women. In this study, we use a randomized control trial to examine whether facilitating Vietnamese...
Working Paper
Gender inequality in employment in Mozambique
We investigate the trend in the gender employment gap in the expanding non-subsistence sector of the economy in Mozambique, a country still characterized by a large subsistence agricultural sector. We show evidence that the gender gap has widened...
Book
Towards Gender Equity in Development
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. As a result of widespread...
Journal Article
The gendered crisis
THIS ARTICLE IS ON EARLY VIEW | This article studies the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the gendered dimensions of employment and mental health among urban informal-sector workers in Delhi, India. First, the study finds that men’s employment...
Working Paper
Civil wars and stumbling of patriarchal societies
This research project traces how women’s participation in the Liberian civil wars, as combatants and peace agents, reconstructs gender relations in the post-civil war context. The current literature examines the role of women in the governance of...
Working Paper
Social protection for working-age women in Tanzania
Tanzania has expanded its social protection framework significantly over the past decade, but the country continues to grapple with important gender inequalities. This paper examines, first, the evolution and effects of Tanzania’s social protection...
Journal Article
Changing male perceptions of gender equality
In this study, we use a randomized control trial to examine whether asking Vietnamese men to reflect on gender equality can reduce their gender bias. We randomly selected two groups of married men in four rural provinces and asked the first group to...
Working Paper
Physical proximity and occupational employment change by gender during the COVID-19 pandemic
Previous economic downturns such as the 2008–09 Global Financial Crisis disproportionately affected male employment due to greater contractions in industries typically filled by men (e.g., manufacturing). However, after the imposition of the ‘hard’...
Research Brief
Are women’s labour force participation rates improving in sub-Saharan Africa?
Several sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries have achieved substantial economic growth in the past 30 years. Likewise, access to education has considerably expanded, as reflected in rising enrolment rates for both men and women. Female labour force...
Working Paper
Gendered implications of the waves of COVID-19 and economic upgrading trajectories in digital value chains
Women play a critical yet under-researched role in global digital agri-food value chains, especially in smallholder production, which affects how they are able to economically upgrade (improve crop yields and product quality, and increase product...
Journal Article
Female labor force participation in sub-Saharan Africa
Female labor force participation rates have been stagnating despite rising female education in sub-Saharan Africa since the turn of the millennium. Using representative and repeated census data from a heterogeneous sample of 13 sub-Saharan African...
Working Paper
Employment policy in Mainland Tanzania: what’s in it for women?
Tanzania has experienced relatively strong and stable economic growth accompanied by social stability over the past two decades. The country is also pursuing an ambitious development plan with significant employment objectives. For development to be...
Blog
The COVID-19 crisis, informal workers, and gender — understanding the intersections
by
Martha Chen
March 2022
The COVID-19 crisis — the pandemic, restrictions, and recession — has not been a grand leveler. While all of us, rich and poor, faced the fear and...
Working Paper
The impact of the Employment Equity Act on female inter-industry labour mobility and the gender wage gap in South Africa
The Employment Equity Act No. 55 of 1998 was introduced by the South African government to address the legacy of apartheid and ensure equitable representation of black people and women in the South African labour market. Although the impacts of the...
Blog
Kanika Mahajan – IEA featured economist interview
by
UNU-WIDER
September 2021
Kanika Mahajan, a researcher engaged in UNU-WIDER's project on 'The changing nature of work and inequality', is the August 2021 featured economist of...
Working Paper
The gender productivity gap
We examine the patterns and correlates of the productivity gap between male-owned and female-owned firms for informal enterprises in India. Female-owned firms are on average 45 per cent less productive than male-owned firms, with the clearest...
Working Paper
Trade liberalization, employment, and gender in Ethiopia
This paper analyses the impact of trade liberalization on local labour markets in Ethiopia, with a focus on the gender dimension of employment. By exploiting rich micro-level data on Ethiopian workers, we evaluate the effect of the Ethiopian trade...
Blog
Motherhood and the gender gap in Latin America
by
Inés Berniell, Lucila Berniell, Dolores de la Mata, María Edo, Mariana Marchionni
March 2021
Gender gaps in labour supply, income, and wages are still large despite the remarkable convergence of roles of men and women in labour markets over...
Working Paper
Female labour force participation in sub-Saharan Africa
Female labour force participation rates have stagnated in sub-Saharan Africa since the turn of the millennium. This paper aims to explain this aggregate pattern by decomposing it into the labour supply behaviour of different birth cohorts and age...
Blog
Supply or demand? Exploring the mechanisms behind the rise of female labour force participation in Mexico
by
Sonia Bhalotra, Manuel Fernández
March 2021
At the global level, gender gaps in labour force participation have narrowed and over half a billion women have joined the workforce in the last 30...
Working Paper
The gendered crisis: livelihoods and mental well-being in India during COVID-19
This paper studies the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the gendered dimensions of employment and mental health among urban informal-sector workers in India. First, we find that men’s employment declined by 84 percentage points post-pandemic relative...
Working Paper
Dynastic measures of inter-generational mobility with empirical evidence from Indonesia
We suggest a simple and flexible criterion to assess inter-generational mobility. It accommodates different types of outcomes (continuous outcomes such as potential earnings, or discrete ones such as education groups) and captures dynastic...
Working Paper
Intergenerational mobility in occupational choices
Historically, the issue of intergenerational evolution of income, wealth, and socioeconomic status has been the subject of considerable research in the analysis of inequality. Such intergenerational linkages are anticipated to come from two sources...