if there is any enforcement at all. We find that strict legal restrictions placed on women’s autonomy in opening or running a business, as well as in participating in the formal private sector, which were in place at the time of the survey, were not fully enforced in the DRC. Nonetheless, a non-negligible percentage of women were subject to spousal permission when running their business or when joining the private sector workforce, and a high percentage of firms reported discriminatory behaviors against women. Interestingly, limitations to women’s autonomy and employer’s discrimination are more pervasive outside the capital city, Kinshasa, which may suggest that cultural norms may be at play, or that there is stricter enforcement of laws beyond the capital city, or both. However, regardless of the discriminatory legal environment, we find that firms’ discriminatory behavior harms women’s labor market outcomes, both in terms of their representation among the upper echelons of management and in terms of their participation in the overall workforce. In particular, we find a negative relationship between the existence of restrictions on the activities that women can perform and female employment and career progression. We also find evidence that firms that allow female workers to work night shifts hire significantly more women. The same positive and statistically significant relationship is found for firms that provide maternity leave.

To summarize, the paper contributes to the analysis of female labor market participation in the following ways. First, it contributes to the growing literature on gender-based legal discrimination and female labor market outcomes by exploring the extent to which gender disparities in the laws are reflected in disparities in firms’ behavior. This offers unique and rarely available insights on the extent to which laws are enforced. The context of the DRC, a country where a low level of law enforcement is expected given the high level of informality, implies the results are a lower bound effect. Second, given the extensive geographical coverage of the data, the paper highlights the need to account for geographical heterogeneity within an economy – areas beyond the capital city may face a different legal environment due to lack of enforcement, or face more ingrained social norms that are unresponsive to legal reforms. Finally, it is one of the few papers that explore the effects of employers’ discriminatory behavior on female labor market outcomes using nationally representative firm-level data in a developing country context. Within this strand of literature, it complements a recent study by Kotikula et al. (2020) that explores discriminatory firms, defined in terms of their perceptions of women employees, in South Asia.<sup>6</sup> The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 gives some background about the DRC in general and the DRC labor market in particular; this section also discusses the institutional and cultural environment in the country. Section 3 describes the data used in the analysis. Section 4 presents some patterns of

> 6 See Azmat and Petrongolo (2014) for a review of discrimination studies looking at gender and labor market outcomes.

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