Abstract
The informal sector has long constituted a gap in the knowledge of women's labor. This paper seeks to fill a part of that knowledge gap using a 2002 household survey from Dakar, Senegal. 83% of working women are informal, compared to 50% of men. Multinomial logit analysis, controlling for education and other covariates, reveals that women are 3-4 times less likely to work formally (i.e., in the private formal sector or public sector) rather than informally. This may be due to the possibility provided by the informal sector of combining unpaid domestic work with paid work: informal women devote significantly more time to unpaid work than do women in the formal sector. We also use interval regression techniques to estimate Mincer equations to assess whether there is a wage gap between men and women in each sector. Controlling for personal characteristics, profession and industry, there is no significant gender wage effect in the private formal sector. Yet in the informal sector, women experience a 28% lower wage on average. This result holds across specifications and robustness tests. One reason for this may be that female informal entrepreneurs are found in smaller and less capital intense firms than men.