The low engagement of women in occupations outside agriculture is problematic. Several factors could be holding women back from non-agriculture forms of employment, including low education and skills, social norms, legal restrictions and employer discriminatory behavior. Social norms are hard to decipher and are typically alluded to using polling data. A 2017 ILO Gallup poll found that in the DRC 81percent of respondents agreed that it is perfectly acceptable for any woman in the family to have a paid job outside the home if she wants one (gender disaggregation, male: 72 percent, female 89 percent). About 26 percent of male respondents would rather the women in the family stay at home and not work, while 13 percent of female respondents would rather stay at home. In comparison, in more egalitarian countries like Denmark, only 2 percent of male respondents would rather the women in the family stay at home and not work, while 6 percent of female respondents would rather stay at home. Thus, while social norms do point to a large portion of respondents in the DRC favoring women’s pursuit of work outside the home, it is still far lower than in societies where gender differences are less prevalent.

The legal environment in the DCR is also worth close consideration. At the time of the survey, women in the DRC faced several legal restrictions that have since been reformed. In 2012, the World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law (WBL) index, which measures the extent of legal discrimination that women around the world face as they navigate through their working lives, scored the DRC 42.5 out of 100, meaning that in the DRC at that time, women had less than half the amount of rights as men in the areas covered by the index. The global average score for the same year was 71.38.<sup>11</sup> The legal restrictions to women's economic opportunities in the DRC come in three main forms. One entails the requirement of spousal permission as noted in the family code. The other two are in the labor code and relate to restriction on work activity and night work. Articles 448-450 of the old 1987 Family Code note that “A woman must obtain the authorization of her husband for all legal acts in which she is obliged to perform a service which she must perform in person” and that “a woman cannot go to court in civil matters, acquire, alienate or bind herself without the authorization of her husband.” Legal acts include: signing a contract, registering a business, opening a bank account, starting a job. Whereas, Article 137 of labor code states that “The Labor Inspector can require the examination of children, women and people with disabilities by a doctor to check whether the work does not exceed their strengths. This requisition is right to the request of the interested parties.” Thus, women can be excluded from some activities. Furthermore, the labor code states that “Women, children under 18 years old and people with disability cannot work the night in industrial establishments

> 11 The extent of gender-based disparities in the DRC is documented also by two additional indexes. The OECD Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI) rated discrimination against women in the DRC in 2014 as “very high.” The UN Gender Inequality Index (GII) ranked DRC 149th of 153 economies, and the most recent Global Gender Gap report from the World Economic Forum, in which the DRC has been included for the first time, ranked the DRC 144<sup>th</sup> of 149 economies ( <mark>Hausmann et al.</mark> , 2018).

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