Gender equality in labour force participation, economic growth and development in South Africa

ABSTRACT

Studies in feminist literature have found that development effects gender equality in labour force participation, but gender equality has also been found to effect economic growth. These two streams of literature, however, lie largely distinct with few studies directly investigating the inter-relationships between development, growth and gender equality, and as such, this lack of knowledge curtails the development of appropriate policy. This study explores the effect of development on gender equality in labour force participation and the effect of this gender equality on economic growth in South Africa on a quarterly basis from 2008 to 18 using Autoregressive Distributive Lag models. Economic development is found to have a positive effect on gender equality in the long run while greater female participation in the labour market is found to have no effect on growth. These results suggest that further development should be prioritised to support gender parity in economic opportunities in South Africa.

KEYWORDS:

• Economic development
• economic growth
• gender equality in labour force participation
• ARDL
• South Africa

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• CODES: J16
• J21

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 These studies adapted Becker’s (1957) discrimination theory to gender discrimination in employment.

2 Boserup (1970) adapted Kuznet’s (1955) income inequality theory to the gender inequality case.

3 While semi-annual data for the period 2000–07 was available from the previously conducted semi-annual surveys, the employment and unemployment fields differed too much from the quarterly surveys to use the data.

4 No control variables were included. This mirrors the single- (Kilinç et al. 2015) and multi-country (Luci 2009; Gaddis & Klasen 2014) studies of the effect of economic output on gender equality. Moreover, several studies that have examined the effect of a particular variable on economic growth in a country have also excluded control variables (see for example Odhiambo 2009; Ozturk & Acaravci 2010). The small sample size also impacted upon the decision to exclude control variables.

5 Although some of the theory and evidence surveyed in Section 2.2 points to a non-linear effect of economic growth on gender equality in LFP, this is seen to occur over a long period in a country’s development. Given the short time period examined, it was not possible to ascertain how the effect of development on gender equality in LFP may have changed through South Africa’s development. Instead, this analysis enables us to examine whether economic development in the country has a negative, positive or no effect on gender equality in LFP and hence what portion of the curve South Africa is currently positioned on.

6 The results for economic growth are not shown as it is equivalent to the test of LRGDP in first differences.

7 The lower bound critical values are 5.26 and 7.63 for the 5% and 1% levels respectively, while the upper bound critical values are 6.16 and 8.83 for the 5% and 1% levels respectively based on a sample size of 40.