The analysis considers working women, both salaried and self-employed, aged 1570.4 In addition, the samples from each country are restricted to those working women who report positive wages and number of hours of work, as defined in each respective survey.<sup>5</sup> The wage variable used in the analysis is the hourly wage.<sup>6</sup> Furthernore, observations with missing data on any of the variables of interest were dropped.

Table 1 (a-c) contains summary statistics for the variables used in the conditional analysis for each country.<sup>7</sup> The human capital variables include schooling, experience, and tenure (Argentina) in the current job. The set of worker characteristics includes age, race, position in the household and marital status. The occupation variables include dummies for professional, skilled and unskilled women.<sup>8</sup> The regional variables include three dummies for Brazil (the northeast, south and southeast regions), and five dummies for Costa Rica (San Jose metropolitan area, rest of the central region, Chorotega and Brunca, Central Pacific, Atlantic and North Huertar). No regional dummies are included in the specifications for Argentina since our sample corresponds to Greater Buenos Aires only. Industry characteristics include dummies for manufacturing, retail, personal services, finEncial services, professional services, public services, social services, and a residual dummy called "other" that includes non-identified industries. Finally, a dummy for informal salaried and for domestic service are included to determine differences within each labor market with respect to what is often identified as vulnerable female employment.<sup>9</sup>

# _3.1 Characteristics of working women._

Over the analyzed periods, female workers increased their educational attainment across all countries. The proportion of female workers with more than twelve years of education irncreased significantly and there was a decline in the proportion of women with less than six years of education. However, the increase was not uniform across labor markets. In all three countries the proportion of women with a college education increased more in the salaried sector than in the self-employment sector.'<sup>0</sup> A second pattern in all three countries is that women working in the self-employment sector were on average older than were women working in the salaried sector. The proportion of women older than 45 increased in both labor markets during the sample periods while the proportion of younger women decreased, perhaps due to the increase in educational attainment of the female working population during the sampled years. We 4The self-employed sector includes domestic service. Female family workers and employers are excluded from the analysis.

- **_5_** All the surveys contain information on the number of hours worked the week previous to the survey, and the monthly earnings from the job.

- **6** Except in Brazil, wages are deflated using the corresponding consumer index. In Argentina wages are measured at 1988 Pesos and in Costa Rica at 1989 Colones. In Brazil wages are measured in US dollars of 1995.

- **7** The figures on the tables are non-weighted by the survey inflation factors. The weighted sample proportions were very similar to the non-weighted proportions.

- **8** Unfortunately, our samples did not include data on family background and characteristics, which have been shown to be important in determining wage differentials in developing countries (see for example Lam and Schoeni (1993) and the references there in).

- 9 See the Appendix for a definition of all variables.

- "3 Because there are some differences in the education systems, it is not appropriate to make exact comparisons of the education variables across countries.

_5_