include a set of individual characteristics which includes age, age squared, education, marital status, urban residence and province dummies and a set of pre-crisis job characteristics which includes ii XX size of the establishment, job tenure and sector. As in previous analysis, the potential gendered impact of jj,2019 ZZ the crisis operating through norms associated with childcare responsibilities is assessed by analyzing separately women and men with any child aged 0-5; women and men with any school-aged child (age 6- 14) and women and men without any child aged 0-14. Results are presented in Table 9.

_Table 9: Gendered impact of the COVID-19 crisis on private sector employment_

**_Dependent variable – probability of being employed in the private sector in 2020/21, conditional on being employed in the private sector in 2019/20._**

||**A**<br>|**ll**<br>|**Any 0-**<br>|**5 child**<br>|**Any 6-**<br>|**14 child**<br>|**No chi**<br>|**ld 0-14**<br>|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
||**(1)**|**(2)**|**(3)**|**(4)**|**(5)**|**(6)**|**(7)**|**(8)**|
|Female|-0.172***|-0.166***|-0.319***|-0.322***|-0.264***|-0.260***|-0.093***|-0.093***|
||(0.015|(0.016|0.029|(0.03|0.024|(0.026|0.02|(0.022|
|Tenure||0.003***||0.004**||0.002*||0.005***|
|||(0.001||(0.001||(0.001||(0.001|
|Firm size 5-9||0.074***||0.074***||0.077***||0.061**|
|||(0.012||(0.02||(0.018||(0.021|
|Firm size 10-19||0.125***||0.133***||0.136***||0.122***|
|||(0.016||(0.023||(0.022||(0.026|
|Firm size 20-49||0.154***||0.144***||0.189***||0.124***|
|||(0.019||(0.028||(0.026||(0.035|
|Firm size 50+||0.170***||0.170***||0.151***||0.217***|
|||(0.017||(0.027||(0.026||(0.025|
|N|20323|20323|7582|7582|9668|9668|7825|7825|
|r2|0.057|0.087|0.077|0.113|0.073|0.106|0.052|0.091|

_Note_ : Sample period covers March 2020 to February 2021; sample consists of all people in working age (15+) who were employed in the private sector in 2019/20. All specifications include controls for age, age squared, education, marital status as well as season, urban and province dummies. Control for pre-pandemic private sector job characteristics include the following: size of establishment, sector and tenure. Specifications include constant term and are estimated using sample weights and robust standard errors. Standard errors in parentheses. * p<0.1, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.01 The regression analysis results confirm the previous findings. Women with children, and in particular those with younger children in the 0 to 5 age group were the most disadvantaged compared to men, with a lower probability of retaining private sector employment of 32 percent, compared to a 26 percent gender gap for individuals with school aged children (age 6 to 14). While these results are in line with what was previously observed and consistent with prevailing gendered distribution of care responsibilities within the household, female workers’ disadvantage persists even when focusing on the subset of individuals with no children in the 0-14 age group. Even in absence of children, Iranian women were 9 percent less likely than Iranian men to retain their salaried employment in the private sector. Interestingly, controlling for pre-crisis job characteristics, such as tenure and establishment size (specifications numbers 2, 4, 6 and 8), does not affect significantly the size of the gender gap. These results seem to suggest that the gendered impact of the employment crisis spurred by COVID-19 was driven by both supply (decline in female labor supply due to the increase in care responsibilities/unpaid care work) and demand 12