prevailing wage rates, levels of occupational segregation and male-female wage/earnings differentials, household demographics, individual human capital characteristics, and—in the case of self-employment—availability of land, credit and productive technology.

This section examines levels and trends of female labor force participation, barriers to women’s labor force participation, gender patterns of sectoral employment, male-female wage gaps, and the role of female labor force participation in protecting households from the effects of macroeconomic shocks.

_Labor force participation: measurement issues and descriptive statistics_ In general, five types of work merit attention: formal market work, informal market work, subsistence production, unpaid care work, and volunteer work (Beneria, 1993; UNIFEM, 2000; UNIFEM, 2005). Of these, only formal market work is adequately measured using conventional data collection methods (UNIFEM, 2005). We report data on labor force participation, informal employment and self-employment below, but it is important to note that both may be measured with significant error, especially in the case of women.<sup>6</sup> The broadest indicator of women’s labor market activity is the female labor force participation rate. Female labor force participation rates vary significantly across regions and countries (see Figure 2 below). The Middle East and North Africa has the lowest female labor force participation rate of any developing region at 28.4 percent in 2004; East Asia had the highest rate at 67.7 percent. Of course, female participation rates may be low because overall participation rates are low, so it is important to look at the ratio of female-to-male participation rates. Female participation rates as a share of male rates range from a low of 37 percent in the Middle East and North Africa to a high of 83 percent in East Asia. Not surprisingly, regions with the highest female participation rates relative to male rates (East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia) are also those regions with the highest global participation rates (at 75.0, 74.1 and 70.2 percent, respectively). Central and Eastern Europe and the CIS region are exceptions, with relatively high ratios of female-to-male participation rates, but relatively low global participation rates.

There is substantial evidence that female labor force participation rates have a U-shaped relationship with respect to national income levels across countries. At low levels of per capita income, participation rates are rather high (on the order of 45-60 percent). Participation rates fall as per capita income rises, reaching a minimum of about 35 percent at per capita income levels of about US$2,500, and then participation rates rise again with per capita income (Goldin, 1995; Mammen and Paxson, 2000). Goldin (1995) and Mammen and Paxson (2000) hypothesize that the U-shape results from a situation in which, at low levels of economic development, women are engaged in large numbers in agriculture and non-farm household enterprise activities. As a

> 6 At the level of data collection, there are several challenges.  First, the line agricultural and domestic work may be particularly hard to establish for women (fetching wood, caring for animals, etc.  See Beneria, 2001).  Second, identifying homeworkers and enumerating live-in domestic servants presents serious challenges for household surveys.

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