which excludes university faculty, special education teachers and other teachers.<sup>20</sup> A typical teacher in Africa is a 38-year-old male living in an urban area. In absolute terms, teaching is still more likely to be a career for men: on average, three out of five African teachers are male. By way of contrast, three-quarters of teachers are female in the U.S. (NCES, 2018). However, in relative terms, women in the countries in our study are more represented in teaching than in other wage jobs where male workers make up an even larger share (73%); these findings are consistent with the pattern in high-income countries like the U.S (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2021). Indeed, although we observe a lower share of male teachers in the teaching force as national income levels rise across our sample (corr = -0.58, p-value < 0.05, N = 15), the gender difference between teaching and other wage jobs persists across income levels. For example, in Namibia, the country with the highest GDP per capita in our sample, 35% of teachers versus 58% of other wage workers are male. In Malawi, one of the low-income countries, while the share of male workers is 60% in teaching, the share is 80% in other wage jobs.

The average age of teachers in our study countries ranges from 35 (in Burkina Faso, The Gambia, Ghana and Zambia) to 45 (in Liberia), with an average of 38. Teachers are about two years older than other wage workers.<sup>21</sup> About 60% of African teachers live in urban areas, which is also where most wage workers are located. Considering that 59% of the population of SubSaharan Africa lives in rural areas,<sup>22</sup> the concentration of teachers in urban areas demonstrates a potential mismatch, consistent with findings from previous research (Bashir et al. 2018; UNESCO, 2019).<sup>23</sup> In terms of school type, about 20% of teachers work in private schools in these countries.<sup>24</sup> This is consistent with the rise of private schools in Sub-Saharan Africa in recent years (World

> 20 Note that we include these neither in the group of teachers nor in the “other wage workers” group.

> 21 We present more detail on the age distribution of teachers in Appendix Table A6. Some countries, like Burkina Faso, have relatively low variation in teacher age; others, like DR Congo, have higher variation. The cross-country average of the 25<sup>th</sup> percentile in teacher age is 31 years old, and the average 75<sup>th</sup> percentile in teacher age is 45 years old.

> 22 Data from World Development Indicators (World Bank, 2021).

> 23 The surveys only collected the area an individual lived but not necessarily where the person worked, which would be the ideal way to distinguish whether teachers both lived and worked in urban areas or lived in urban areas but traveled to work in rural areas. The latter is not uncommon in many African countries, which means that our data are not ideal for analyzing urban-rural differences in teacher labor markets. Furthermore, many countries have centralized allocation of teachers rather than local hiring.

> 24 Teachers were considered working in private schools unless they reported government (at any level) or any public entity as their employer.

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