[go: up one dir, main page]
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ems/euriss/19752.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

To what extent can disparities in compositional and structural factors account for the gender gap in unemployment in the urban areas of Kenya?

Author

Listed:
  • Wamuthenya, W.R.
Abstract
In recent years, there have been sharp changes in the Kenyan labour market. Most notably, Kenya has experienced a remarkable increase in female labour force participation in its urban areas over the period 1986 to 1998. The sharp increase in female LFPR has not been matched by an increase in their employment rate and consequently unemployment amongst women remains a pressing problem. In contrast, male unemployment rates are substantially lower and have not increased significantly over time. This paper uses data from two time periods, 1986 and 1998, to identify the factors that influence the likelihood of being unemployed and to examine why women are more vulnerable to unemployment than men are. Using a decomposition framework, the paper establishes whether the gender gap in unemployment is driven by differences in observable characteristics between women and men (a composition effect) or differences in the returns to these characteristics in the labour market (structural effect/discrimination). The analysis shows that the overall likelihood of being unemployed is heavily influenced by sex, marital status, household-headship and human capital characteristics such as experience and level of education. The decomposition estimates display that for both periods, gender gaps in unemployment are overwhelmingly, about 81 to 84 per cent, attributed to the composition effect.

Suggested Citation

  • Wamuthenya, W.R., 2010. "To what extent can disparities in compositional and structural factors account for the gender gap in unemployment in the urban areas of Kenya?," ISS Working Papers - General Series 19752, International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam (ISS), The Hague.
    • Handle: RePEc:ems:euriss:19752
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://repub.eur.nl/pub/19752/wp502.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Paul Schultz, T., 2002. "Why Governments Should Invest More to Educate Girls," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 30(2), pages 207-225, February.
    2. Ghazala Azmat & Maia Güell & Alan Manning, 2006. "Gender Gaps in Unemployment Rates in OECD Countries," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 24(1), pages 1-38, January.
    3. Assaad, Ragu & El-Hamidi, Fatma & Ahmed, Akhter U., 2000. "The determinants of employment status in Egypt," FCND discussion papers 88, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).
    4. Arjun S. Bedi & Paul K. Kimalu & Damiano Kulundu Mandab & Nancy Nafula, 2004. "The Decline in Primary School Enrolment in Kenya," Journal of African Economies, Centre for the Study of African Economies, vol. 13(1), pages 1-43, March.
    5. Vera A. Adamchik & Arjun S. Bedi, 2003. "Gender pay differentials during the transition in Poland," The Economics of Transition, The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, vol. 11(4), pages 697-726, December.
    6. Francine D. Blau & Lawrence M. Kahn, 2007. "Changes in the Labor Supply Behavior of Married Women: 1980–2000," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 25(3), pages 393-438.
    7. Richard Blundell & John Ham & Costas Meghir, 1989. "Unemployment and Female Labour Supply," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Joan Muysken & Chris Neubourg (ed.), Unemployment in Europe, chapter 1, pages 9-36, Palgrave Macmillan.
    8. Larry DeBoer & Michael C. Seeborg, 1989. "The Unemployment Rates of Men and Women: A Transition Probability Analysis," ILR Review, Cornell University, ILR School, vol. 42(3), pages 404-414, April.
    9. Giuseppe Bertola & Francine Blau & Lawrence Kahn, 2007. "Labor market institutions and demographic employment patterns," Journal of Population Economics, Springer;European Society for Population Economics, vol. 20(4), pages 833-867, October.
    10. Jovanovic, Boyan, 1979. "Job Matching and the Theory of Turnover," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 87(5), pages 972-990, October.
    11. Niall O'Higgins, 1997. "The challenge of youth unemployment," International Social Security Review, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 50(4), pages 63-93, October.
    12. Johnson, Janet L, 1983. "Sex Differentials in Unemployment Rates: A Case for No Concern," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 91(2), pages 293-303, April.
    13. repec:aer:wpaper:194 is not listed on IDEAS
    14. O'Higgins, Niall, 2001. "Youth unemployment and employment policy: a global perspective," MPRA Paper 23698, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    15. Blackaby, D. H. & Clark, K. & Leslie, D. G. & Murphy, P. D., 1994. "Black-white male earnings and employment prospects in the 1970s and 1980s evidence for Britain," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 46(3), pages 273-279, November.
    16. John C. Ham & Jan Svejnar & Katherine Terrell, 1999. "Women’s unemployment during transition," The Economics of Transition, The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, vol. 7(1), pages 47-78, March.
    17. Jacqueline Agesa & Richard Agesa, 1999. "Gender differences in the incidence of rural to urban migration: Evidence from Kenya," Journal of Development Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 35(6), pages 36-58.
    18. Arulampalam, Wiji & Stewart, Mark B, 1995. "The Determinants of Individual Unemployment Durations in an Era of High Unemployment," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 105(429), pages 321-332, March.
    19. Wamuthenya, W.R., 2010. "Economic crisis and women’s employment rate in a Sub-Saharan African country," ISS Working Papers - General Series 19427, International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam (ISS), The Hague.
    20. Alan S. Blinder, 1973. "Wage Discrimination: Reduced Form and Structural Estimates," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 8(4), pages 436-455.
    21. Ronald L. Oaxaca & Michael R. Ransom, 1999. "Identification in Detailed Wage Decompositions," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 81(1), pages 154-157, February.
    22. Anthony Myatt & David Murrell, 1990. "The Female/Male Unemployment Rate Differential," Canadian Journal of Economics, Canadian Economics Association, vol. 23(2), pages 312-322, May.
    23. Behrman, Jere R & Birdsall, Nancy, 1983. "The Quality of Schooling: Quantity Alone is Misleading," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 73(5), pages 928-946, December.
    24. Lingle, R Christopher & Jones, Ethel B, 1978. "Women's Increasing Unemployment: A Cross-Sectional Analysis," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 68(2), pages 84-89, May.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Tariq Hassan Haque & M Ohidul Haque, 2022. "The Unemployment Imbalance Between Non-English-Speaking Migrant Women and Australian Born Women," Journal of Quantitative Economics, Springer;The Indian Econometric Society (TIES), vol. 20(2), pages 459-478, June.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Karolina Goraus & Joanna Tyrowicz & Lucas van der Velde, 2017. "How (Not) to make women work?," GRAPE Working Papers 1, GRAPE Group for Research in Applied Economics.
    2. Ghazala Azmat & Maia Güell & Alan Manning, 2006. "Gender Gaps in Unemployment Rates in OECD Countries," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 24(1), pages 1-38, January.
    3. Ana Carolina Ortega Masagué, 2006. "El diferencial entre las tasas de desempleo de hombres y mujeres en Argentina," Working Papers 2006-08, FEDEA.
    4. Ina GANGULI & Ricardo HAUSMANN & Martina VIARENGO, 2014. "Closing the gender gap in education: What is the state of gaps in labour force participation for women, wives and mothers?," International Labour Review, International Labour Organization, vol. 153(2), pages 173-207, June.
    5. Alena Bičáková, 2016. "Gender unemployment gaps in the EU: blame the family," IZA Journal of European Labor Studies, Springer;Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit GmbH (IZA), vol. 5(1), pages 1-31, December.
    6. Axel Heitmueller, 2004. "Job Mobility In Britain: Are The Scots Different? Evidence From The Bhps," Scottish Journal of Political Economy, Scottish Economic Society, vol. 51(3), pages 329-358, August.
    7. Myeong-Su Yun & Eric S. Lin, 2015. "Alternative Estimator for Industrial Gender Wage Gaps: A Normalized Regression Approach," Pacific Economic Review, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 20(4), pages 569-587, October.
    8. Alexander Mihailov & Giovanni Razzu & Zhe Wang, 2020. "The Gender Unemployment Gap Across the Euro Area: The Role of Macroeconomic Shocks and Labour Market Institutions," Economics Discussion Papers em-dp2020-26, Department of Economics, University of Reading.
    9. Cristiano Perugini & Marcello Signorelli, 2010. "Youth labour market performance in European regions," Economic Change and Restructuring, Springer, vol. 43(2), pages 151-185, May.
    10. Wamuthenya, W.R., 2010. "Economic crisis and women’s employment rate in a Sub-Saharan African country," ISS Working Papers - General Series 19427, International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam (ISS), The Hague.
    11. Lin, Eric S., 2010. "Gender wage gaps by college major in Taiwan: Empirical evidence from the 1997-2003 Manpower Utilization Survey," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 29(1), pages 156-164, February.
    12. O'Higgins, Niall, 2012. "This Time It's Different? Youth Labour Markets During 'The Great Recession'," IZA Discussion Papers 6434, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    13. García, A., 2016. "Oaxaca-Blinder Type Counterfactual Decomposition Methods for Duration Outcomes," Documentos de Trabajo 14186, Universidad del Rosario.
    14. Madhu S. Mohanty, 2003. "An Alternative Explanation for the Equality of Male and Female Unemployment Rates in the U.S. Labor Market in the Late 1980s," Eastern Economic Journal, Eastern Economic Association, vol. 29(1), pages 69-92, Winter.
    15. Fenglian Du & Jian-chun Yang & Xiao-yuan Dong, 2007. "Why Do Women Have Longer Unemployment Durations than Men in Post-Restructuring Urban China?," Working Papers PMMA 2007-23, PEP-PMMA.
    16. Michael Bar & Seik Kim & Oksana Leukhina, 2015. "Gender Wage Gap Accounting: The Role of Selection Bias," Demography, Springer;Population Association of America (PAA), vol. 52(5), pages 1729-1750, October.
    17. Alison L. Booth, 2006. "The Glass Ceiling in Europe: Why Are Women Doing Badly in the Labour Market?," CEPR Discussion Papers 542, Centre for Economic Policy Research, Research School of Economics, Australian National University.
    18. Michael E. Martell & Peyton Nash, 2020. "For Love and Money? Earnings and Marriage Among Same-Sex Couples," Journal of Labor Research, Springer, vol. 41(3), pages 260-294, September.
    19. Ilhom Abdulloev & Ira N Gang & Myeong-Su Yun, 2014. "Migration, Education and the Gender Gap in Labour Force Participation," The European Journal of Development Research, Palgrave Macmillan;European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI), vol. 26(4), pages 509-526, September.
    20. Sami Napari, 2008. "The Early‐career Gender Wage Gap among University Graduates in the Finnish Private Sector," LABOUR, CEIS, vol. 22(4), pages 697-733, December.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    composition & structural effects; decomposition; discrimination; gender; household-headship; unemployment;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ems:euriss:19752. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: RePub (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/issssnl.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.