Gender Production Differentials in Africa

In many West African countries, large rural multigenerational households farm common household plots as well as allocate individual plots to different family members. Multiple studies have found that women plot managers achieve lower yields than men. This work uses a unique 17-year panel dataset from southern Mali to investigate this gender production differential. The long-span and specificity of the data allow us to simultaneously test many of the reasons put forth in the literature for gender production differentials: input & labor use, land tenure, polygamy, and social status. We find that female plot managers in this dataset do achieve significantly lower yields than men and that the effect is mostly explained by labor allocation and social status within the Malian household. 1 The authors are respectively, former Masters student and Professor, Department of Agricultural & Applied Economics, University of Wisconsin – Madison. Address for correspondence: [email protected].