remain in traditionally female sectors.<sup>3</sup> These findings are consistent with micro-level data results found by Campos et al. (2015) in Uganda and Alibhai et al. (2015) in Ethiopia who find that firms owned by women in male-dominated sectors, on average, are far more profitable than firms in traditionally female sectors. Next, we compare the female crossovers and non-crossovers earnings with two categories of male enterprise owners: men in male-dominated sectors and men who operate in traditionally female sectors. We document a hierarchy of earnings consistent with the presence of both horizontal and vertical segregation with men in male-dominated sectors on top; women in male-dominated sectors and men in female-concentrated sectors in the middle tier; and women in female-concentrated sectors at the bottom.

These findings are also consistent with cross-country evidence from the developing world. Research relying on World Bank enterprise surveys finds a significant gender gap in sales across countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and Latin America (Bardasi et al. 2011; Islam et al. 2018). In SubSaharan Africa, sales of female-owned businesses are 31 percent lower than businesses owned by their male counterparts (Bardasi et al. 2011). The results for Eastern Europe and Central Asia are corroborated by a separate study that found majority female-owned enterprises to have lower sales and lower total factor productivity than those that were majority male-owned (Sabarwal and Terrell, 2008). Results of a gender gap are less conclusive when entrepreneurship is measured in terms of profits, number of employees, or business survival rates as opposed to revenues.

While existing literature examines industry-based differences in profitability for developing countries, this phenomenon has been less well studied for developed countries. Hence, we next examine the profit differentials across male and female firms by country grouping.<sup>4</sup> For developing countries, our previous ranking holds. However, in developed countries we find that while female crossovers do earn more than female non-crossovers, male firms in female- and male-dominated sectors have similar levels of profits and these are higher than female-owned firms in any sector.

Since industries that are traditionally male could provide an opportunity for women to earn higher returns, next we turn to the analysis of factors that could encourage or prevent women from entering these sectors. Specifically, we explore the factors that are associated with crossing over into the higher-return maledominated sectors. We find that being young, married, having a male role model, and inheriting the business are positively correlated with the probability of being a female crossover. Identifying the characteristics of women who have successfully entered higher-return male-dominated sectors will help us to develop policy interventions that enable women to build businesses that could positively affect growth while reducing gender earning gaps. Indeed, work from the United States has shown that reducing racial and gender occupational segregation accounted for 40 percent of the growth in market GDP per person from 1960 to 2010 (Hsieh et. al. 2019).

Within the factors associated with crossing over, we also examine the entrepreneurial propensities of women crossovers by assessing a range of cognitive and socioemotional skills related to entrepreneurship. A large literature in economics and psychology has documented the importance of these skills for

> 3 The mean of monthly profits in our sample is US$189,139 and the median is US$872 (the distribution of profits in the sample is skewed to the right). 4  We follow the country classification assigned by the IMF in the World Economic Outlook (April 2009) which divides the world into two major groups: advanced economies, and emerging and developing economies. Please refer to the introduction to the WEO's Statistical Appendix for details: https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2009/01/weodata/groups.htm

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