My Research

Gender gaps in agricultural productivity remain a major constraint to economic growth and poverty reduction in Sub-Saharan Africa, yet the mechanisms underlying these gaps are not well understood. We address this using high-frequency data from the 2019 Agriculture Labor Survey, tracking 1,060 plot managers across 15 Nigerian states over  the full 2018--19 agricultural season. Conditioning on plot size, female-managed plots produce 36\% less than male-managed plots in the South and 46\% less in the North, yet narrowing these gaps requires tackling very different constraints in each region. In the South, the gap is primarily a labor story: female managers achieve substantially higher returns to labor than male managers, particularly to hired labor, yet access significantly less of it and face greater within-season volatility in what they can mobilize, a constraint that bites hardest during land preparation and planting when the return differential is largest. In the North, the gap is primarily a time allocation story: controlling for how managers allocate time across activities outside the plot reduces the conditional gender gap by 22 percentage points and renders it statistically insignificant. The pattern is consistent with nonmarket work as a key mechanism, unlike in the South, nonmarket work carries a significant productivity penalty for all Northern managers, and female managers are disproportionately exposed to it, spending more than twice as many hours per day on domestic responsibilities as male managers. This burden peaks as early as 5:30am, directly competing with the start of the agricultural day. These findings show that the gender productivity gap is not a unitary phenomenon: its drivers are region-specific, and so must be the policies that address it, improving women's access to labor at critical moments in the season in the South, and reducing the domestic responsibilities that crowd out their agricultural time in the North.