Abstract
Gender disparities in terms of opportunities, security and labor force participation still persist in sub-Saharan Africa. In this region, over 60% of the workforce is employed in agriculture and 96% of cultivated land is rainfed. Climate change may, in this context, reinforce these inequalities. Using country-level aggregate household survey data, we examined the effects of climate change on gender inequalities in the labor market. The results indicate that temperature change increases the probability of labor force participation for women and reduces the probability for men in urban areas. Similarly, the temperature shock increases the probability of participation in unpaid work for both women and men. In contrast, rainfall shocks reduce the probability of participation in paid work in rural areas. The analysis reveals, taking into account the nature of the climate shock, differentiated effects on women and men. These results highlight the gendered impact of climate change on the labor market.
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Notes
For example, the patriarchal system and the domestic division of labor.
Landowning households offer their labor power and also hire labor on their farms, while landless households only rent their labor from landowning households. See Mahajan (2016) for more details.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the national statistical offices of the various countries in our sample for providing the underlying data that made this research possible: Benin, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Lesotho, Malawi, Mali, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, and Uganda. We are also grateful to the African Union for the financial support of our research.
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Diallo, S., Atangana Ondoa, H. Climate shocks and labor market in sub-Saharan Africa: effects on gender disparities in urban and rural areas. J. Soc. Econ. Dev. (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40847-024-00331-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40847-024-00331-x