The gender wage gap in three African countries

In this article we examine the size and determinants of the gender wage gap in three African countries--Ethiopia, Uganda, and the Cote d'Ivoire. We extend existing methods in a way that addresses both the index number and the sectoral decomposition problem. The article is organized in the following fashion: Section II outlines our method for decomposing wage differentials; data sources, methodology, and results are reported in Section III. We find that the gender wage gap is very small in the Cote d'Ivoire but substantial in Ethiopia and Uganda. Where the gap is substantial, it is largely attributable to differences in returns to wage-generating characteristics. In all three countries, the wage gap is narrowed because women are overrepresented in the higher-paying public sector. This result would have been masked had we used conventional decomposition techniques. Our conclusion is in Section IV.