In 2016, lower adoption of export crops is the key driver of the gender gap in agricultural productivity. Other key drivers are lower use of pesticide and of chemical fertilizer. A new factor that emerges as a driver of the gender gap in 2016 is the lower number of fields managed by female-headed households, which matters in particular for food crop productivity. Overall, a gender difference in productivity favoring men is still found for the lower half of the productivity distribution, among poorer households. The lower number of fields managed by the household, lower adoption of export crops and lower use of pesticide work to increase the gap in all deciles, but more strongly so in the lower deciles. However, the endowment component driven by labor inputs peaks at the bottom of the distribution, with the lowest-productivity households being most impacted by low access to household male labor.

The key takeaway from our paper is that Côte d’Ivoire has witnessed a remarkable shrinking of its gender gap over the past decade, driven by a closing of the gender gap in both export crop and food crop productivity. During the same period, there has been a significant government push to increase the inclusion of women in agriculture programs, which is evident in the large increase in input use—especially pesticide—in female-headed household (in absolute terms, as well as relative to male-headed households). Together with our second key finding that while labor inputs matter more for food crop productivity, nonlabor inputs are key for export crop productivity, this gain in non-labor inputs by female-headed households helps to explain the disappearance of the export crop productivity gap. Nonetheless, our results also indicate that part of the increase in agricultural productivity observed during the past decade is due to lower landholdings by female-headed households. Strengthening women’s land rights – along with increasing their access to labor and facilitating their adoption of export crops – should be the key policy priorities in Côte d’Ivoire for improving female farmers’ livelihoods.

Section 2 of this paper provides a descriptive analysis of the 2008 and 2016 survey sample in terms of socio-demographic and agricultural variables, and explores differences related to the gender of the household head. Section 3 presents our results. It is split in two subsections that estimate and decompose the agricultural productivity gender gap for 2008 and 2016 using Oaxaca and RIF decompositions, as well as a third subsection that presents trends in gender gaps’ explanatory factors between 2008 and 2016 and provides a discussion of the drivers of the observed changes in gender gaps between both years. The last section concludes with policy recommendations and suggestions for future research.

# **2 Data**

Our 2008 analysis uses household data from the Enquête Niveau de Vie des Ménages (ENV). The data are representative at the national, regional and urban/rural levels. The data overall contain 12,600 households, of which 6,159 were agricultural households, and 5,760 households report some production. Observations with productivity above the 99th percentile or below the 1st percentile are excluded, leaving 5,647 observations. Finally, 217 observations are excluded for not having information available for covariates included in the analysis.

This yields the final 5,428 household data set, of which 752 are headed by women (13.9 percent), while 4,676 (86.1 percent) are headed by men. The sample restriction imposed on covariate availability does not yield a significant difference in productivity between households excluded and those that remain in the sample. However, the households remaining in our final sample do have some differences from the original sample: they cultivate more land, the household head is married and has primary and tertiary education at a higher frequency. The households also have a higher dependency ratio, more male labor use, a higher 4