TITLE:
Occupational Choice in the Urban Labor Market in Congo (DRC): Can Gender Disparities Be Identified?
AUTHORS:
Kalemasi Mosengo Cedrick, Mbuyamba Mulumba Samuel Blaise
KEYWORDS:
Occupational Choice, Employment Status, Self-Employment, Salary, Gender
JOURNAL NAME:
Modern Economy,
Vol.13 No.10,
October
20,
2022
ABSTRACT: The purpose of this study is to quantify the
disparities between men and women in occupational choice and particularly in
the choice of employment status and to identify the factors that contribute to
explaining them. The results thus found confirm the general consensus on the
importance of the three groups of
explanatory factors (individual characteristics, household characteristics and those of the state of the labor market) of the choice of self-employment
status. The decomposition analysis shows that the estimated average
probabilities of self-employment are 73.51% for women and 38.46% for men and
the total gender gap in self-employment is 35.05 percentage points. It emerges
that this difference is explained at 48.76% by the differences between men and
women in the endowments. Taking into account
the different characteristics shows that the differences in human capital
endowments (Eduction) represent 1.428% to 4.190% of the gender gap in
access to salaried employment and that other characteristics such as those
related to the social as well as those of the state of the labor market would
contribute to accentuate the gender gap in the occupational choice. However,
the very high nature of the gender gap unexplained by unobservable factors
would intuitively imply that other factors not taken into account in the
equations could have substantially explained this gap in self-employment.