# **1 Introduction**

Farming is the primary source of food and income in Sub-Saharan Africa and provides up to 65 percent of all jobs on the continent. Agricultural development – and in particular improving productivity in the sector – has the potential to spur growth and substantially reduce poverty in the region (Carletto et al. 2013). In Sub-Saharan Africa, women account for half of the agricultural workforce, and a gap between male and female farmers in agricultural production, both in terms of output and productivity, has been largely documented across the region. Closing the gender gap in agricultural productivity is thus a key entry point to improving productivity overall on the continent. Past studies have shown that the potential gross gains to GDP from closing the agricultural productivity gender gap would be $100 million in Malawi, $105 million in Tanzania and $67 million in Uganda (UN Women 2015).

To close the gender gap, it is not only essential to shed light on the main determinants of the productivity gap, but also to see what factors have contributed to closing it over time. Doing so will contribute to closing the existing “knowledge gap” on this topic, as well as the “policy gap” that goes with it, by explaining the steps that African governments and their development partners can take to equalize opportunities for female and male farmers ( <mark>O'Sullivan et al. 2014)</mark> .

This paper contributes to the literature by providing new evidence on how agricultural productivity gaps in Côte d’Ivoire have changed over time and why, while addressing some of the limitations of previous studies. Several existing Sub-Saharan African studies show that estimates of the gender productivity gap become insignificant once differences in access to productive resources and individual characteristics are considered (Alene et al. 2008; Gilbert et al. 2002; Kinkingninhoun-Mêdagbé et al. 2010; Moock 1976; Oladeebo and Fajuyigbe 2007; Saito et al. 1994; Vargas Hill and Vigneri 2009). This implies that the difference in productivity arises mainly from differential access to resources and differential farmers’ characteristics by gender. Yet, conclusions based on prevailing evidence are often limited by methodological and data constraints, as well as by neglect of distributional statistics besides the mean.

To our knowledge, ours is the first paper to estimate the gender gap in agricultural productivity in Côte d’Ivoire. Côte d’Ivoire offers an interesting setting for such an analysis. As most Sub-Saharan African countries, the country’s economy relies greatly on agriculture. According to the Enquête Nationale sur la Situation de l'Emploi et du Travail des Enfants (ENSETE), in 2013, 50.4% of the workforce worked in agriculture. The agricultural sector also accounted for 21.6% of the GDP in 2017 (WDI, World Bank). Women are heavily involved in agricultural production, with 46.2% of the female workforce working in agriculture. One specificity of Ivoirian agriculture is that it relies heavily on non-staple food production. Of the 19 Sub-Saharan African countries studied in Chauvin et al. (2012), Côte d’Ivoire has the second-highest agriculture income share coming from non-staple food other than cereals or fruits and vegetables, both for urban households (57.64%) and rural households (62.12%). The high prevalence of export crop production allows us to differentiate the extent of the gap between food crops and export crops, and document to what extent the aggregate gender gaps observed are due to occupational segregation between crop types versus lower access to inputs and returns from these inputs, within food and export crops.

The second main contribution of our paper is that while most existing studies rely on one cross-sectional estimate due to data limitations, our paper uses two cross-sections, allowing for an analysis of trends in productivity gaps over time as well as changes in its determinants. We use two nationally representative surveys from Côte d’Ivoire: the 2008 household survey Enquête Niveau de Vie des Ménages (ENV 2008), which is a traditional household living standards survey that was collected between June and September 2008, and the latest employment survey Enquête Nationale sur la Situation de l'Emploi et le Secteur 2