Publication: The Labor Productivity Gap between Formal Businesses Run by Women and Men
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Published
2020-09-20
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1354-5701
Date
2021-06-16
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This study analyzes gender differences in labor productivity in the formal private sector, using data from 126 mostly developing economies. The results reveal a sizable unconditional gap, with labor productivity being approximately 11 percent lower among women- than men-managed firms. The analyses are based on women’s management, which is more strongly associated with labor productivity than women’s participation in ownership, which has been the focus of most previous studies. Decomposition techniques reveal several factors that contribute to lower labor productivity of women-managed firms relative to firms managed by men: Fewer women-managed firms protect themselves from crime and power outages, have their own websites, and are (co-)owned by foreigners. In addition, in the manufacturing sector, women-managed firms are less capitalized and have lower labor costs than firms managed by men.
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The strategy is more immune to endogeneity problems than pure cross-section regressions. Third, it tests several mechanism or mediating factors as predicted by the theory through which exporting impacts women’s employment prospects. The predictions are confirmed in the data, an unlikely scenario if exports were a mere proxy for other correlated drivers of women’s employment. The results show a large, positive impact of higher exports on the share of women workers. A conservative estimate is that for each percentage point increase in the ratio of exports to total sales, the share of women workers increases by 0.16 percentage point. Consistent with the theoretical predictions, this positive relationship is much larger (more positive) in industries that rely more on women workers, in country-industry pairs where competitive pressure is largely from international markets in comparison to less competitive domestic markets, when social attitudes and labor laws are more favorable toward women’s work, and when the law and order situation is more business friendly.Publication Women Managers and the Gender-Based Gap in Access to Education(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-05)Several studies explore the differences in men’s and women’s labor market participation rates and wages. Some of these differences have been linked to gender disparities in education attainment and access. The present paper contributes to this literature by analyzing the relationship between the proclivity of a firm to have a female top manager and access to education among women relative to men in the country. The paper combines the literature on women’s careers in management, which has mostly focused on developed countries, with the development literature that has emphasized the importance of access to education. Using firm-level data for 73 developing countries, the analysis finds strong evidence that countries with a higher proportion of female top managers also have higher enrollment rates for women relative to men in primary, secondary, and tertiary education.
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