# **1 Introduction**

Agricultural productivity, in general, is low in many Sub-Saharan African countries where most farmers are smallholders, but even lower for female farmers compared to their male counterparts. Studies have persistently identified a gender gap in agricultural productivity of 20 to 30 percentage points in disadvantage of women as an important barrier for the development of the agricultural sector. A number of these studies indicate that once differences in access to productive resources and individual characteristics are taken into account, estimates of the gender productivity gap become insignificant. Henceforth, the evidence speaks of a difference in productivity that arises mainly from differential access to resources and differential farmers’ characteristics by gender. Nevertheless, conclusions based on prevailing evidence are limited by the studies’ (i) country and crop-specificity of findings; (ii) methodological and data constraints; and (iii) neglect of distributional statistics beyond the mean (Moock 1976; Saito et al. 1994; Udry 1996; Quisumbing et al 2001; Tiruneh et al. 2001; Gilbert et al. 2002; Akresh 2005; Oladeebo and Fajuyigbe 2007; Alene et al. 2008; Goldstein and Udry 2008; Vargas Hill and Vigneri 2009; Kinkingninhoun-Medagbe et al. 2010; Kilic et al. 2013).<sup>1</sup> This paper contributes to the gender inequality literature<sup>2</sup> by providing recent evidence of agricultural productivity differences and solves some of the limitations described above. Following the classical approach of the gender wage differences literature, decomposition methods are used to determine to what extent the differences in productivity are explained by: (i) gender disparity in the levels of determinants of production (e.g. differential access to productive inputs, technology, training, or individual characteristics of land managers); and/or (ii) gender inequality in the returns of those determinants.

Ethiopia's latest figures in terms of economic growth, recent policy reforms in the agricultural sector and regional heterogeneity make it a relevant and interesting country to study. Its economy relies heavily on agriculture with close to 80 percent of employment and 46 percent of GDP concentrated in this sector.<sup>3</sup> The certification of usufruct rights has been recently implemented with the purpose to increase tenure security, generate incentives to invest, and boost productivity (Deininger et al., 2007). However, similar to most Sub-Saharan countries, its agricultural sector has low levels of technology development (e.g. fertilizer use, irrigation) and relies on smallholder production. Therefore, the analysis of factors that explain differences in gender productivity might have interesting policy implications for other countries in the region.

The only previous work similar to this paper in the Ethiopian context finds a 26 percent productivity<sup>4</sup> disadvantage for agricultural production of female-headed households. It concludes that the difference in productivity is mostly explained by lower access to inputs. In particular, if female-headed households had used the average amounts of inputs employed by male-headed households, their estimations would predict a 1.3 percent higher productivity for female-headed

> 1 See Peterman et al. (2011), World Bank (2012, table 5.1), and Kilic et al. (2013) for a comprehensive review of the evidence.

> 2 The related literature on wage gender gaps consistently reports that the wage differences have been steadily declining, but are still present. Improved female access to education, health, child-care arrangements, and access to training are examples of drivers that explain improved female labor participation and reductions in gender wage gaps (Hundley 2000; Hersch and Stratton 2002; World Bank 2012).

> 3 Source: http://data.worldbank.org/country/ethiopia

> 4 Tiruneh et al. (2001) measure productivity as the value of output per hectare, which is the same approach to be considered in the present study.

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