30 September 2025, 13:30 CET
Seminar Room 1.205
Andrew Laitha
ETH Zurich
Globally, women earn about 20% less than men, with wage inequality persisting across sectors. Agriculture remains a key employer in lower-income countries, especially for the working poor, making it a critical sector for understanding wage disparities. A few studies have examined gender wage gaps in agriculture, but they focus on stable political contexts, despite the growing prevalence of conflict and its potential to disrupt agriculture and labor markets. Agricultural wage inequality in conflict settings remains largely unexplored due to the scarcity of data on farm workers in conflict settings. This paper addresses this gap by examining gender wage disparity among farm workers in Myanmar, using a unique primary dataset of 1,504 farm workers combined with conflict data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED). The decomposition analysis shows a 19% gender pay gap, with both men’s and women’s wages about 6% lower in conflict zones, indicating that the gender gap remains unchanged in these areas, likely due to offsetting effects. The gender pay gap is mainly driven by structural factors (systemic inequalities), not differences in individual traits (the endowment effect), meaning significant pay disparities persist even when men and women have similar characteristics, jobs, and qualifications. Further research on gender disparities and labor dynamics in conflict-affected food systems is crucial to inform policies that address working poverty and strengthen agricultural workforce resilience.
Piero Ronzani
Vita-Salute San Raffaele University
This study investigates how gendered breadwinner expectations shape economic behavior in rural Kenya. Using a lab-in-the-field experiment with 400 small-scale farmers in Vihiga County, we test how psychological and social pressures of being the primary provider influence decision-making in both individual work choices and collective action. Participants completed real-effort tasks, choosing between a high-effort, high-reward option and a low-effort, low-reward alternative, followed by a public goods game framed around a communal seed bank. Preliminary results reveal that heightened strain led male participants to avoid demanding but more rewarding tasks and to reduce contributions to the communal seed bank. These behavioral shifts suggest that the psychological consequences of breadwinner strain can lock individuals into lower-return activities while undermining cooperation—features of a potential behavioral poverty trap. Addressing the pressures of breadwinning is key to fostering both economic empowerment and social cohesion.
Anri Sakakibara
Technical University Munich
Existing evidence on the nexus between conflict and female labour force participation (FLFP) predominantly stems from developed nations which may not fully capture the dynamics in developing contexts. This paper examines the impact of the Vietnam War on Vietnamese women’s labour market outcomes 14 to 44 years after its conclusion. To this end, I match comprehensive historical data on ordnance deployed by the United States in Vietnam to microdata. I find that war-induced demographic shocks contributed to increasing FLFP rates in South Vietnam, but not North Vietnam where Socialist ideology may have played a larger role in promoting FLFP. In terms of mechanism, I find that war widows increased their labour supply to compensate for the negative income shock caused by the loss of their husbands. I also find that daughters of widows are more likely to work than daughters of non-widows. However, I find a lack of support for demand-side mechanisms, namely, substitution towards female labour.