Conference Agenda

We investigate the effects of international migration of a household member on female employment in Albania, considering the availability of childcare as a conditioning factor for women's decisions. In order to instrument the presence of a migrant member abroad, we exploit the collapse of the Communist regime and the mass emigration of Albanians in the early 1990s as a natural experiment for migration networks. We use the Albanian DHS survey 2018 for our main analysis. Its geo-referenced clusters are combined with the universe of kindergartens in Albania and their geo-location to construct spatial preschool availability. Our results show that female carers of young children have a greater probability to have wage employment if a member of their household is abroad. This effect only arises for women living with children attending preschool or for those residing in high preschool-dense areas. The results are stronger for low-educated women and those not receiving remittances. The article thus shows that childcare services can leverage the effects of international migration in Albania. The analysis also shows that greater kindergarten availability directly increases female labour supply, particularly in rural areas. This evidence calls for care policy packages and municipal childcare service provision to be re-discussed in order to increase accessibility.

While sub-Saharan African countries dominate with the highest rates of female entrepreneurial activity globally, women-owned businesses in the region are less likely to be successful compared to male owned business. On average, women-owned firms post profits that are 34 % lower than male-owned firms and have fewer employees and lower sales. Gender gaps in firm profitability range from 8-86 percent depending on the sector. Aside access to credit and other constraints, women’s time constraint in relation to domestic and unpaid care work have been noted to be critical in explaining the gaps in firm performance between female-owned and male-owned enterprises. The time constraints female entrepreneurs face as a result of their primary responsibilities in domestic and care responsibilities influence various strategic decisions such as expanding business networks, engaging in business innovation and adopting businesses practices which may lead to less productive firm outcomes. Recent evidence suggests that childcare programs have important implications for women’s labour market outcomes. However, our understanding of how female entrepreneurs’ time constraints affect business outcomes is limited, particularly given the limited availability of time use data in many sub-Saharan African country contexts. The current study contributes to the literature as it explores the effects of childcare on business outcomes in a developing country context where female entrepreneurial activities are highest in the world. Using data from 1771 female owned businesses in an ongoing field experiment we estimate the effect of unpaid childcare on the business outcomes of female entrepreneurs in Ghana. Our analytical sample consists of highly educated female entrepreneurs (40 percent with college; 20 percent with senior high school ;30 percent with junior high school degrees) compared to the entire population where only 5 percent of women have a college degree. Childcare is measured in three main ways. The first is the number of hours that female entrepreneurs spend in childcare, second is who bears the primary responsibility of child and other care activities within the household and third is women feeling of spending too much time on family obligations such as care and domestic work. Childcare reduces the number of hours worked by three hours and the likelihood of female entrepreneurs engaging in any business collaborations or taking any steps towards collaborations by 69 percent and 11 percent respectively. Our findings have important implications for policy making required to harness the potential of female owned business to spur economic growth.

A significant share of paid care work continues to be provided within household by paid domestic workers. Among the EU-28 countries on average 1.3% of the labor force are employed directly by household, with significantly higher shares in southern European countries (EC, 2018). In Israel, there are about 70,000 local workers employed directly by households in Israel, constituting 1.7% of the Israeli labor force. Paid domestic work occurs at the margin between public labor markets and private households yielding a range of employment arrangements, for the same type of work, spanning from formal employment with full employment protection rights and social saftey nets to informal employment (Romero, 2002; Blackett, 2011). Even in countries with largely formal labor markets, estimates of the magnitude of informal work in this sector range from 70% in Italy and Spain to less than 20% in Sweden (EC, 2018).

In this paper, I use survey and administrative data sources to characterize domestic workers in Israel and analyze their employment arrangements. The focus of my analysis are local domestic workers, who under Israeli labor law are entitled, at least in theory, to the full host of rights held by employees in general. To identify determinants of employment arrangements I compare to domestic workers to workers in the same occupations: Cleaners; Child Care; and Personal healthcare, not employed by households. For this research, the Israeli CBS constructed an anonymized database using a variety of administrative datasets documenting workers' household composition, formal employment histories, education and training and utilization of welfare and other state benefits.

The analysis shows that among workers in occupations found both within households and in the public labor market, a third have at least some post-secondary education, compared to half among the adult population in Israel, and 70% of them belong to households with below median household income. However, within each occupation domestic workers come from households with relatively higher income levels, and among clears, they also significantly more years of schooling compared to those employed in the public or private sector. In demographic terms, domestic workers in all occupations are less likely to be first generation immigrants or to belong to the Palestinian minority. In line with these patterns, we find that domestic workers hourly wages are higher and they work less hours per week, indicating that domestic work may offer non-pecuniary benefits in terms of temporal flexibility in combining work and family commitments.

The objective of the study is to analyze the adjusted gender pay gap and the associated economic inequalities of women in the labor markets of ten countries in Eastern and Southern Africa (ESA): Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda and South Africa; as well as to shed further light onto the impact of unpaid domestic work on the GPG in Tanzania and Uganda. The average GPG for the region is 26.8%, with extant heterogeneity. When adjusted for personal and job characteristics, the gap reduces to 17.1%, and in six of the 10 countries. It is mostly sectoral segregation that explains the GPG in ESA, followed by personal characteristics, occupations and jobs’ informality.

In ESA, the hourly gender pay gap is lower than the monthly one, suggesting that women on average work shorter hours than men. Indeed, women spend more daily hours in doing unpaid domestic or care activities, at the expense of the hours in paid employment, and are disadvantaged in the daily hours devoted to self-development, socializing, cultural and leisure activities. This corroborates the notion of men as the main breadwinners in the household and stems from the deep-rooted stereotypes, prejudices and cultural norms in the society, according to which unpaid domestic tasks should be borne by women and girls.

ESA women face heterogeneous employment rates ranging from 76.1% (Mozambique) to 37% (South Africa). The sectors that are most commonly top-three ‘'feminine’ include households as employers, human health and social services, education and accommodation, in which women are usually lower paid than men. Women are generally overrepresented in the sectors which employ most of the employees. Women usually have lower relative shares and lower wages in the highest-skill - managerial occupations than men, lending some support to the existence of the glass ceiling effect which prevents women from climbing up the occupational and wage ladders.

Children impose a responsibility for women in ESA and negatively interfere with their labor-market behavior, though may work to extend the paid hours of fathers. Even when women are employed, they still bear the unpaid work around the household and the children in the similar fashion in which non-employed women do. Married women, overall, face clearly and significantly a deeper gender employment gap than single ones, reflecting the weight of the household responsibilities as well as potentially wife’s subordination to the husband’s income and economic decision-making within the household.