Gender and vulnerable employment in the developing world: Evidence from global microdata

Abstract

UNU-WIDER employs a fair use policy for reasonable reproduction of UNU-WIDER copyrighted content-such as the reproduction of a table or a figure, and/or text not exceeding 400 words-with due acknowledgement of the original source, without requiring explicit permission from the copyright holder.

Opting out of public sector employment: Gender and occupational aspirations among university graduates in Sierra Leone

“…This hypothetical question is used as an indicator of early career sectoral occupational aspirations and has been validated against an incentivised short‐term internship programmes (see Table A1). The controls $$$ \left({x}_i\right) $$$ include being married/cohabiting and having children, as the literature has established that these factors matter for female labour supply decisions (see, e.g., Bhalotra & Umana‐Aponte, 2010; Espino et al, 2017; Lo Bue et al, 2021).…”

“…First, lower ambitions for public sector employment among females is associated with less favourable perceptions of public sector employment in key areas that are deemed important to graduates such as salary, status from employment, the ability to contribute to society, training opportunities and career progression. This suggests that although women, in general, have more precarious labour market outcomes (Kidder & Raworth, 2004;Lo Bue et al, 2021;Luci et al, 2012) and earn lower wages (Blau & Kahn, 2017;Gradín, 2021), highly educated women may have higher personal aspirations than previously understood. The women in this study value jobs that will provide a good salary, training opportunities, status and career progression, and they may be willing to moderate sectoral aspirations (away from the public sector) to meet these desires.…”

“…For example, women in developing countries still end up in ‘bad’ jobs with low pay, low security and limited social mobility, and in all regions of the world save for the least developed, the share of women in managerial position has increased since 2000 (Luci et al, 2012). Such differences in labour market outcomes may be driven by labour supply decisions specific to women, which often relate to (i) household responsibilities (Averett et al, 2018; Bhalotra & Umana‐Aponte, 2010; Boushey, 2008; Espino et al, 2017; Lo Bue et al, 2021), (ii) human capital differences such as education and training (Duflo, 2012), (iii) barriers to career progression once employed—such as gender‐based discrimination (Addison et al, 2014; Blau & Kahn, 2017; Gobillon et al, 2015), (iv) cultural and social norms which place restrictions on women (Jayachandran, 2021); or at the individual level, (v) overconfidence of men (relative to women) in the labour market (Roy et al, 2018; Santos‐Pinto, 2012).…”

“…Though evidence suggests increasing female participation in many developing countries (Duflo, 2012; Espino et al, 2017; Rendall, 2013), differences in labour market outcomes persist. For example, women tend to be employed in more precarious jobs (Kidder & Raworth, 2004; Lo Bue et al, 2021; Luci et al, 2012), earn lower wages (Blau & Kahn, 2017; Gradín, 2021), work fewer hours—though this varies with education level (Espino et al, 2017; Jones & Ramchand, 2016), and have a lower probability of promotion throughout their careers (Addison et al, 2014). These findings paint an important picture of gender disparities after employment is secured ( ex post ).…”

Vulnerable employment in developing economies: The case of sub‐Saharan African countries

“…In such studies, the main points about model specification and the choice of econometric method are the heterogeneity of cross‐sectional units and endogeneity of explanatory variables. To compensate for various forms of heterogeneity and endogeneity, dummy variable approaches and various fixed effect estimators are usually chosen (Bocquier et al, 2010; Lo Bue et al, 2021; Zhou & Ma, 2021).…”