Gender and rural non-farm employment

While the female employment in the non-traditional agricultural export sector discussed earlier has been an important phenomenon in some regions of Latin America, rural labour markets are in general a less important source of income for women than the myriad forms of off-farm self-employment that are receiving increased attention in academic and policy circles. National-level case studies almost universally show that within the non-farm sector wage employment is dominated by men and self-employment by women. In Nicaragua, for example, men are approximately 15 percent more likely to engage in agricultural wage employment, and about 2 percent less likely to engage in non-farm self-employment (mostly small enterprises serving local markets), compared to women with identical individual, household and regional characteristics (Corral and Reardon, 2001). In Honduras, farm wage labour is primarily a male activity, with the exception of coffee harvesting, while non-farm wage employment is gender segregated by sector, with men working in construction, transportation and manufacturing and women in domestic service, administration and textiles.^[17] Most rural self-employment in Honduras is undertaken by women with relatively low levels of educational attainment, in activities such as bakeries, tortilla-making, market stands, sewing workshops, photocopy services, repair shops and restaurants (Ruben and Van den Berg, 2001).

Evidence from several countries suggests that within the rural non-farm sector, women are significantly more likely to engage in low-productivity, low-return activities - what Lanjouw (2001) refers to as “safety net” employment. In El Salvador, for example, where women are largely excluded from the agricultural wage labour market, female employment is similarly concentrated in activities such as petty commerce. Compared to men with similar levels of human capital and landholdings, and controlling for household size and regional effects, economically active Salvadoran women are 50 percent more likely to report a non-farm employment as their primary occupation. Moreover, women are approximately only 7 percent more likely than men to be employed in non-farm jobs that pay above the average agricultural wage, but 37 percent more likely to be employed in “residual” activities in which earnings are below the market rate.^[18] Consequently, women’s earnings from non-farm activities are almost one-third lower than men’s (Lanjouw, 2001).

In northeastern Brazil, where rural women are significantly more active in the agricultural sector compared to the rest of Latin America, they also make up half of the total non-agricultural rural economically active population, concentrated in the self-employed services and educational sectors. Comparing women and men with similar individual, household and regional characteristics, rural northeastern Brazilian men are somewhat more likely than women to have non-agricultural employment, but significantly less likely to rely on low-productivity, low-return sectors such as textiles, vending and services (Ferreira and Lanjouw, 2001). In Ecuador, where the average probability of primary employment in the non-agricultural sector is approximately 8 percent for men compared to 21 percent for women, men are also significantly more likely to be employed in non-farm jobs with earnings above the average agricultural wage. Women with similar characteristics have a much greater chance of working in low-return forms of self-employment and earn 70 percent less than men, holding other factors constant (Elbers and Lanjouw, 2001).

Why is off-farm self-employment so much more prevalent for rural women than for men across Latin America? The answer probably lies in a combination of supply and demand factors, as well as the differing asset endowment positions of men and women in the rural economy. On the supply side, self-employment may offer a degree of flexibility necessary for women who are trying to meet both reproductive and income-generating responsibilities; mothers with young children in particular need jobs that allow them to combine childcare with work. On the demand side, formal labour markets in Latin America tend to be highly segregated by gender (as well as by age and marital status), so that for many rural women there are simply no wage jobs available for them. Finally, asset constraints faced by rural women, in particular their lack of property in land, simultaneously limit their options to pursue self-employment in agriculture as independent farmers and their ability to obtain sufficient capital to undertake more remunerative forms of off-farm employment.