the employment status graphs. Thereafter, the sample is limited to self-employed/family business household heads to understand how income and coping strategies varied among different characteristics of the owner of the family business. Since the data were collected in different months in each country, the country sample for each wave differs. The country-province fixed effects control for time-invariant characteristics across local markets. The full list of countries for each period is presented in annex A.

_By gender_

**While women’s and men’s employment increased during the first 8 months of the pandemic, the gender gap in employment grew as the crisis evolved.** About 50 percent of men and 60 percent of women were not working in the first month of the pandemic (April 2020) (Panel A of Figure 2). For both groups, this percentage declined with the passing of time until November 2020 with a larger decline for men. These results indicate that the initial negative impact of the pandemic on female and male employment was short lived.<sup>36</sup> By November 2020, men were 15 percentage points more likely than women to be working and the gender gap was statistically significant. Evidence from Kugler et al. (2021) suggests that the gender differences are not attributable to the presence of children since empirical estimates find that the presence of children explained only a small part of the gender disparity in work stoppage.

**As labor markets recovered, men became more likely to work as wage employees.** Conditional on being employed, the percentage of men who worked as self-employed or in a family business declined by about 10 percentage points, especially in the first months of the pandemic (Figure 2, Panel B). At the same time, the percentage of male household heads with wage employment increased by approximately 8 percentage points. The initial decline in the percentage of men working as self-employed or in family business can be understood as men being better able to switch to wage labor as mobility restrictions affected the possibility of running businesses. However, men’s self-employment did not recover in the last months of 2020 and beginning of 2021, when restrictions were eased. Instead, men continued going back to work in wage employment rather than resuming their self-employed work.

**Women saw a disruption in employment patterns in the first year of the pandemic, with a return to early pandemic work types after a year into the crisis** . For women who were selfemployed or worked in a family business prior to March, the estimated probability of working in a self-employed or family business initially increased by 5 percentage points (Figure 2, Panel B). This may reflect a faster loss in wage employment or it may be a response to an increased demand for home production, forcing women’s market work into the home via household enterprises. This is consistent with the estimated decline in the share of wage employees from 30 percent down to approximately 22 percent (Figure 2, Panel C). The trend reversed in November 2020 and by April 2021, the female share in each type of employment was at a similar level as the beginning of the pandemic (April 2020).

> 36 According to estimates using the first wave of the HFPS for the SSA region, the rate of work stoppage with respect to the prepandemic period was 26 percent for women and 23 percent for men (Kugler et al., 2020).

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