Programs designed to promote female planting of high-value cash crops could also be explored, but should carefully assess the risk that male farmers claim a stake in plots on which cash crops are planted, resulting in heavy leakage of benefits from female to male farmers. Such programs should carefully ensure access to adequate output markets before the switch, and provide complimentary inputs and extension services critical to the success of the adopted crop.

Female managers’ low endowment of hired labor provides weak evidence that there are constraints to them hiring labor. It will be insightful to evaluate projects that provide agents to help women farmers to find, supervise, and finance payment of hired labors.

# **V. Conclusion**

This paper estimates the gender gap in agricultural productivity in Uganda, and unpacks this gap into portions accounted for by differences in household, plot-manager and parcel characteristics, and in returns to these characteristics. The main methodological contribution of the paper is to incorporate panel data methods into this decomposition to ensure that unobserved household, manager, and community characteristics are included in the accounting along with observable characteristics.

We find a simple difference in yield between female and male cultivated plots of 17.5%. After accounting for observed parcel characteristics and unobserved household, community, season and farmer characteristics, the unexplained difference in yield between male and female farmers is 29.6%. Female farmers cultivate smaller plots in a context with strong inverse returns to planted area, giving them a net endowment advantage of 12%.

Decomposing the unexplained difference in returns to characteristics (29.6%), we attribute two-fifths of this (12.5 percentage points) to a large difference in returns to the child dependency ratio. The productivity of female-managed plots also suffers more than the productivity of male-managed plots when the household is located further from the nearest major road, accounting for 6 percentage points of the gap.

In contrast to other country contexts, physical inputs (fertilizer, crop protection chemicals and improved seed) are applied by so few Ugandan farmers that they account for only a small portion of the gender productivity gap (1.9 percentage points). Even so, the statistical significance (if small size) of the contribution of improved seed and crop protection chemicals imply that widespread adoption of physical inputs would substantially widen the gap if the distribution of inputs between male and female managed plots were not equalized in the process.

Male farmer specialization in cash crops, such as coffee and banana, contributes marginally to the gap (2.4 percentage points), even though female farmers who plant these crops receive a higher return from doing so than male farmers who plant them. Female managers are slightly less likely to receive NAADS extension service (.5 percentage points), but we do not find that receipt of this service is less beneficial for female than for male managers.

On net, female managers apply more days of family labor to their plots than male managers. Females are less likely to hire labor, but the net effect is a labor endowment advantage (3.2 percentage points), although our data do not separate family labor by gender or age type.

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