The results of our empirical analysis show that the types of discriminatory practices captured by the survey data are related to women’s labor market outcomes. Firms that have restrictions in place on the types of tasks that female employees can carry out are less likely to have a female top manager and employ fewer women. The negative relationship between job restrictions and female employment is particularly strong in the manufacturing sector. While our results do not provide any evidence that allowing women to work night shifts is related to women in managerial positions, we do find that allowing women to work nights is associated with higher levels of female employment. Once again, this relationship is particularly strong for firms operating in the manufacturing and construction sectors. The final relationship that we uncover in the data is that firms offering maternity leave entitlements are more likely to have hired a married woman. In this case, it is particularly difficult to determine in which direction the causality may run – it may be that firms that report that women are entitled to take maternity leave are those firms that already have married women employed.

Overall, the results show that discriminatory behavior by firms and the presence of a discriminatory environment may prevent women from participating in the formal economy and advancing their careers This has some important implications for economic development. Findings from other contexts have shown that female labor supply is related to economic growth. For example, in the United States, research has shown that without the increase in female labor force participation that occurred between 1890 and 1980, income per capita could have been as much as 14 percent below its actual level (Goldin, 1986). Furthermore, Klasen and Lamanna (2009) find that gender gaps in education and employment considerably reduce economic growth, and Cavalcanti and Tavares (2016) suggest that gender discrimination impacts output through two channels – it decreases women’s participation in economic activity, which has a direct impact on output, and it is associated with higher levels of fertility and lower levels of investment in human capital, which have long-run implications for economic growth.

There are several policy implications that can be drawn from our findings. Firstly, we provide suggestive evidence that removing legal restrictions on the work activities that women can perform and allowing women to work night shifts is expected to boost women’s employment and improve their prospects for reaching managerial positions. Furthermore, the potential impact of removing restrictions may be especially strong in the manufacturing and construction sectors, which is particularly important in the DRC as so few women are employed in these sectors. Segregation of the sexes in terms of occupation has been shown to be an important factor in explaining the gender wage gap (Blau and Kahn, 2017). Laws, unlike social norms, can be changed in the short term, thus, our findings suggest that efforts should be made to remove any outstanding legal restrictions preventing women from reaching their full economic potential. Our second policy implication relates to social norms. The data discussed in section 4 show that outside Kinshasa 21