Is there a social stigma against working wives?

Goldin (1994) argued that low female labour force participation rates (FLPRs) in middle-income countries like Mexico might be related to the expansion of industrial activities, combined with a strong social stigma against wives working in blue-collar jobs. This paper offers the first empirical evaluation of three interrelated hypotheses derived from the social stigma theory using Mexican labour force surveys from 2016–2019. Although Mexico has the highest share of industrial jobs in Latin America and one of the lowest FLPRs in the region, the negative association between marriage and female employment is not confined to blue-collar jobs. Instead, Mexican wives exhibit a homogeneous lower likelihood of working across agriculture, industry, formal services and informal services. An extension of this analysis finds that Mexican women consistently report a strong negative relationship between having a partner and working across different types of industries, white-collar activities, white-collar occupations and high-skill and low-skill service jobs. The evidence also shows that marriage is one of the main reasons why women report having left their last job. Therefore, rather than a sector-specific stigma, the results suggest that Mexican wives are consistently less likely to work than single women, regardless of whether it is a blue-collar or a white-collar job.

50 shades of informality: a gender analysis of informal labour and precarious working conditions

This research challenges the widespread assumption that the informal economy is an invisible and underreported phenomenon that cannot be analysed precisely since most of informal economic activities do not appear on official statistics. Using a unique dataset, this paper disaggregates Mexico’s labour market into 50 economic activities that together employ 98% of the national workforce. Hence, this is the first paper presenting estimates of informal employment rates across economic activities, including those often assumed to be invisible parts of the informal economy. In addition, the paper finds that economic activities with high informal employment rates exhibit extreme gender segmentation—as women either predominate or are almost entirely absent—whereas activities with low informality rates display a more gender-balanced workforce and are closer to gender parity. The analysis also shows how different forms of precarious working conditions are distributed across economic activities, demonstrating that labour precariousness is not exclusively experienced by workers with informal jobs. Moreover, the paper finds that men are more likely to experience workload-related precarity, while women are more likely to experience income-related precarity, a pattern that may be reflecting internalised gender norms around breadwinning and housekeeping roles. Finally, the paper challenges the common assumption that women predominate in informal work. In sum, this paper represents a new advance in the study of the informal economy and can contribute to the design of tailored policies aimed at reducing precarious working conditions in the labour markets of developing countries.

Is there a feminisation of agriculture across countries?

Several studies suggest the existence of a global trend described as the feminisation of agriculture. The arguments converge on a narrative indicating that, as a country develops, the gender composition of agricultural employment is altered in ways that progressively increase the participation of women in this sector. Two mechanisms are typically invoked to explain this process. First, structural transformation reallocates male labour towards higher-productivity employment in industry and services, thereby reducing the presence of men in agricultural activities. Second, both transnational migration and rural–to–urban migration tend to draw men away from rural areas, further weakening the supply of male labour in agriculture. Taken together, these forces are argued to increase the participation of women in agriculture, as they act as a reserve workforce that is progressively taking more jobs in this sector. Contrary to this view, the evidence presented in this study shows the opposite pattern. The higher the share of non-agricultural jobs across countries, the lower the involvement of women in agriculture within countries. Therefore, this study challenges the agricultural feminisation hypothesis and instead presents a cross-country pattern suggesting a global trend towards a defeminisation of agriculture as part of economic development.