Gender differences in employment and why they matter
ing to enter these occupations or professions but can also adversely affect the performance of women already employed in them, especially if gathering information is costly or if networks built around gender are important. For both sets of women, there is a benefit to additional participation by women. In the United States, over the past century, the evolution of female labor force participation can be explained thus: when small proportions of women worked, learning was very slow and the changes in female labor force participation were also small, but when the proportion of women working was close to half the total working, rapid learning and rapid changes in female labor force participation took place.168 Investment and participation decisions are often driven by perceived rather than actual returns, so in the absence of critical group mass in a specific market, imperfect information can slow learning even more.169 Barriers to being part of networks, either because of low female participation rates or because of more explicit gender-based membership rules, can reduce women’s productivity by limiting their ability to gather and share information and potentially access markets. Women are less likely than men to participate in nonexclusively female networks and to be connected to peers within larger, more informal groups. Data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor suggest that in high- and middle-income countries female entrepreneurs are substantially less likely than men to know an entrepreneur who started a business in the two years preceding the interview.170 Similarly, Mexican female entrepreneurs’ difficulties in breaking into men’s networks constitute one of the most important constraints to business growth.171 To the extent that valuable information is communicated through these networks, differential access by gender can impair women’s economic performance. Data from Investment Climate Surveys on formal urban businesses in Sub-Saharan Africa show that having a father who was an entrepreneur or joining a family
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business improves firm productivity,172 suggesting that better access to networks boosts productivity. But the effect is significant only for men, implying that women face stronger constraints that diminish the positive impact of this potential advantage. Women also face barriers to membership in rural organizations and cooperatives, which may further inhibit a channel to facilitate market access.173 Even in West African rural markets, despite the fame of the “market queens” and greater mobility of women relative to other regions, women rarely achieve upward economic mobility. The economic resources and connections necessary for the spatial and social mobility to amass wholesale consignments, command transport, and own processing facilities are typically in the hands of men.174 Here new information and communications technology holds enormous promise for lifting some of the time and mobility constraints that women face (see chapter 6). Finally high female participation rates in specific occupations and significant (or “thick”) networks can also have negative effects.175 New market entrants will be more likely to cluster where others from the same group are already present, perpetuating segregation. This argument has been used in the education literature to explain gender segregation by field of study, as well as the feminization of the teaching profession.176 A lack of adequate information would only exacerbate this phenomenon. For example, employment audits showing that employers discriminate against men in “traditionally female” jobs (nursing) and against women in “traditionally male” jobs177 are more likely to reflect discrimination arising from imperfect information than differential hiring preferences across sectors.
The rules of the game matter: Gender impacts of formal (economic) institutions Institutions conceived to serve men and women equally can have unintended differential impacts on gender outcomes. In some cases, the design and functioning of a particular institu-
[Getting a job] is very difficult, even to have an opportunity for apprenticeship. I have difficulties to be an apprentice because only ‘insiders’ can bring people to apprenticeships.
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Young woman, urban Indonesia
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