exports, women had to assume the full control of the food production cycle, from clearing farm lands and farming it to harvesting food, while at the same time being fully responsible for housework, childcare, and food supply. For instance, according to Henn (1978) women had to work 70 hours a week in Cameroon, compared to an average of 55 hours a week for men.

Empirical evidence suggests that the gender gap in the number of daily working hours remains significant in Sub-Saharan Africa. Despite the generally declining trend and reduction in the length of work in the post-colonial period, women continue to have a much longer working day in Africa. In 2007, a World Bank study noted that on average African women worked 13 hours a day in household and outside labor, while men’s daily average number of hours devoted to work oscillated around 8 hours.

In addition to managing the whole food production chain, women also contributed to the growth and expansion of the cash crop industry, indirectly through their support to male workers confronted with forced labor and low wages [Guyer (1978)]. Low wages received by male workers in the cash economy had to be supplemented with food and other goods produced by women—an informal coping mechanism which may be viewed as the unpaid labor of rural women subsidizing the structurally low colonial wage (often referred to as the starvation wage). According to Henn (1984), the colonial extraction of economic surpluses from the African population through higher taxes, forced production of cash crops, resource extraction, food levied, removal of men to work on colonial enterprises were some of the main reasons behind the higher work load faced by African workers, especially women.

In addition to gender bias in the non-agricultural sector and sexual division of labor in the agricultural sector, the asymmetric nature of the relationship between men and women in the colonial period is also fuelled by inequality in access to opportunities, especially in the distribution and ownership of assets. In this line, it has been argued that women cultivate food crops by traditional methods, while men use modern scientific methods [Boserup (1970)]. At the same time, women had smaller farms, less fertile lands and limited opportunities for occupational mobility and wage employment. This point is further developed by Guyer (1984) who draws on several case studies to show that women’s access to resources was inferior to men’s.<sup>14</sup> However, gender inequality and gender division of labor illustrated most notably by the preeminence of men in the cash crops and export sector is not due to any innate and intrinsic difference in men and women’s ability to perform one set of tasks or the other. Different efficiencies are associated with their efforts because the tasks are gender-typed. Highlighting this point, Henn (1984) argues that African’s women farming and craft activities prove that they were always physically and

> 14 The case studies cover west, central and southern Africa regions and focuses on the peripheral economy (the Senufo of the northern Ivory Coast), an old cash-crop economy (the Ewe of southern Ghana), labor reserve economies (Botswana and the Transkei) and female plantation worker in Cameroon.

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