In this paper we examine the consequences of the increasing informalisation of the Kenyan
economy in the 1990s for the gender gap in occupational outcomes. We use a labour force survey
for Kenya undertaken at the end of the 1990s to ask whether education acts to increase women's
labour force participation and how both education and experience impact on the choices across
the formal and informal sectors. We find that while labour force participation does rise with
education it was higher for women than for men at the end of the 1990s. There are major
differences between the public and formal private sectors. At very high levels of education
women are more likely than men to have a public sector job. In contrast for the private formal
sector, while education does raise the probability of having such a job, the gap between women
and men widens as educational levels increase. At eight years of education, the end of primary
school in Kenya, women are 10 percentage points less likely to have an informal private sector
job than are men and are 22 percentage points more likely to be an unpaid family worker. Clearly
an expansion of private sector activity will not lessen the gender gap unless this pattern is altered.
We have no evidence that the gap between men and women falls as length in the workforce
increases. Indeed in what we think is the most important category for explaining poor female
labour market outcomes, unpaid family labour, the gap widens substantially over 10 to 20 years
of work experience.