Are businesses run by women less productive than businesses run by men?

Where You Work: How Does Gender Matter?
Mary Hallward-Driemeier
Oct 2011

Are businesses run by women less productive than businesses run by men? If we perform a very simple comparison of the average productivity of female and male-owned enterprises, we might answer “yes”. But if we look a bit more closely at the data, a large part of this gap is explained by the fact that women and men are doing different things. If you compare women and men in the same sectors and in similar types of enterprises, the gap shrinks dramatically. Where you work is more important than gender in accounting for the observed productivity gap.

Using data on over 9000 registered enterprises from 32 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, we see a productivity gap of 6 percent. However, controlling for sector, size and capital intensity, the gap disappears (see chart 1). If we include unregistered firms in the analysis, the unconditional productivity gap widens, as women are disproportionately in the informal sector where productivity is even lower. Nevertheless, the same pattern holds: there is little gender performance gap between similar enterprises.

Chart 1: The Gender Gap in Average Firm Labor
Controlling for enterprise characteristics removes the gender gap in productivity (registered firms in 32 Sub-Saharan African countries)

 

Once comparing like with like, the finding of no or few significant differences between female and male entrepreneurs in performance is encouraging. It confirms that Sub-Saharan Africa has considerable hidden growth potential in its women, and that tapping that potential—including improving women’s choices of where to be active economically—can make a real contribution to the region’s growth.

A similar story emerges when we look at the obstacles faced by men’s and women’s businesses. Once the characteristics of the enterprise are controlled for, gender differences in obstacles are generally not significant. Access to electricity is a constraint, particularly for smaller and medium firms, and issues of skills and regulations for larger firms, regardless of the gender of the entrepreneur. There are, however, two exceptions that have a direct gender angle. First, women report having a harder time accessing credit. This is not only due to their running smaller firms (which itself may be a result of this constraint), women often have less access to collateral. This is correlated with a country’s gender gaps in formal property rights and practical constraints in accessing justice (this topic will be elaborated in an upcoming blog).

Second, women often face greater difficulties in dealing with government authorities. They may be expected to pay higher amounts to get things done, may be less likely to get things done even having paid – and the ‘payment’ sought may not only be monetary. Indeed, over a quarter of respondents, male and female, reported that they had heard of sexual favors being requested to obtain licenses, receive credit or in dealing with the tax authorities.

If where you work rather than gender is associated with performance and the main constraints to firm growth, policy makers need to understand why the observed gender patterns of entrepreneurship persist. One of the most significant predictors of whether an entrepreneur joins the formal or informal sector and the size of their enterprises is education. What we find is that across sectors, there are large gaps in education, but few gender education gaps within a sector. Women and men in the formal sector have very similar educational backgrounds, likewise in the informal sector (see Chart 2). However, where gender comes in is that women have fewer years of education, helping explain why fewer women are in the formal sector.

Chart 2: Education varies more by formal/informal sector than by gender

To expand women’s opportunities, more women need to be able to shift where they work. Tackling underlying disparities in access to human capital and assets are key to these efforts. With the same backgrounds, women are able to run the same types of firms as men with equal results.

See full story: https://blogs.worldbank.org/allaboutfinance/where-you-work-how-does-gender-matter to view full story.

The Case Against Global-Warming Skepticism

The Case Against Global-Warming Skepticism. By Richard A Muller
There were good reasons for doubt, until now.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204422404576594872796327348.html
WSJ, Oct 21, 2011

Are you a global warming skeptic? There are plenty of good reasons why you might be.

As many as 757 stations in the United States recorded net surface-temperature cooling over the past century. Many are concentrated in the southeast, where some people attribute tornadoes and hurricanes to warming.

The temperature-station quality is largely awful. The most important stations in the U.S. are included in the Department of Energy's Historical Climatology Network. A careful survey of these stations by a team led by meteorologist Anthony Watts showed that 70% of these stations have such poor siting that, by the U.S. government's own measure, they result in temperature uncertainties of between two and five degrees Celsius or more. We do not know how much worse are the stations in the developing world.

Using data from all these poor stations, the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates an average global 0.64ºC temperature rise in the past 50 years, "most" of which the IPCC says is due to humans. Yet the margin of error for the stations is at least three times larger than the estimated warming.

We know that cities show anomalous warming, caused by energy use and building materials; asphalt, for instance, absorbs more sunlight than do trees. Tokyo's temperature rose about 2ºC in the last 50 years. Could that rise, and increases in other urban areas, have been unreasonably included in the global estimates? That warming may be real, but it has nothing to do with the greenhouse effect and can't be addressed by carbon dioxide reduction.

Moreover, the three major temperature analysis groups (the U.S.'s NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the U.K.'s Met Office and Climatic Research Unit) analyze only a small fraction of the available data, primarily from stations that have long records. There's a logic to that practice, but it could lead to selection bias. For instance, older stations were often built outside of cities but today are surrounded by buildings. These groups today use data from about 2,000 stations, down from roughly 6,000 in 1970, raising even more questions about their selections.

On top of that, stations have moved, instruments have changed and local environments have evolved. Analysis groups try to compensate for all this by homogenizing the data, though there are plenty of arguments to be had over how best to homogenize long-running data taken from around the world in varying conditions. These adjustments often result in corrections of several tenths of one degree Celsius, significant fractions of the warming attributed to humans.

And that's just the surface-temperature record. What about the rest? The number of named hurricanes has been on the rise for years, but that's in part a result of better detection technologies (satellites and buoys) that find storms in remote regions. The number of hurricanes hitting the U.S., even more intense Category 4 and 5 storms, has been gradually decreasing since 1850. The number of detected tornadoes has been increasing, possibly because radar technology has improved, but the number that touch down and cause damage has been decreasing. Meanwhile, the short-term variability in U.S. surface temperatures has been decreasing since 1800, suggesting a more stable climate.

Without good answers to all these complaints, global-warming skepticism seems sensible. But now let me explain why you should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer.

Over the last two years, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project has looked deeply at all the issues raised above. I chaired our group, which just submitted four detailed papers on our results to peer-reviewed journals. We have now posted these papers online at www.BerkeleyEarth.org to solicit even more scrutiny.

Our work covers only land temperature—not the oceans—but that's where warming appears to be the greatest. Robert Rohde, our chief scientist, obtained more than 1.6 billion measurements from more than 39,000 temperature stations around the world. Many of the records were short in duration, and to use them Mr. Rohde and a team of esteemed scientists and statisticians developed a new analytical approach that let us incorporate fragments of records. By using data from virtually all the available stations, we avoided data-selection bias. Rather than try to correct for the discontinuities in the records, we simply sliced the records where the data cut off, thereby creating two records from one.

We discovered that about one-third of the world's temperature stations have recorded cooling temperatures, and about two-thirds have recorded warming. The two-to-one ratio reflects global warming. The changes at the locations that showed warming were typically between 1-2ºC, much greater than the IPCC's average of 0.64ºC.

To study urban-heating bias in temperature records, we used satellite determinations that subdivided the world into urban and rural areas. We then conducted a temperature analysis based solely on "very rural" locations, distant from urban ones. The result showed a temperature increase similar to that found by other groups. Only 0.5% of the globe is urbanized, so it makes sense that even a 2ºC rise in urban regions would contribute negligibly to the global average.

What about poor station quality? Again, our statistical methods allowed us to analyze the U.S. temperature record separately for stations with good or acceptable rankings, and those with poor rankings (the U.S. is the only place in the world that ranks its temperature stations). Remarkably, the poorly ranked stations showed no greater temperature increases than the better ones. The mostly likely explanation is that while low-quality stations may give incorrect absolute temperatures, they still accurately track temperature changes.

When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn't know what we'd find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections.

Global warming is real. Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate. How much of the warming is due to humans and what will be the likely effects? We made no independent assessment of that.

Mr. Muller is a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of "Physics for Future Presidents" (W.W. Norton & Co., 2008).