Gender diversity and productivity in manufacturing firms: evidence from six Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries
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Journal of Management & Organization
Abstract
We revisit predictions about the relationship between gender diversity and firm productivity using data on
1,082 manufacturing firms from six Sub-Saharan African countries: Ghana, the Democratic Republic of
Congo, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Kenya. Recent evidence suggests that a gender-diverse workforce
opens up a firm to a vast range of talent, knowledge and perspectives critical to enhancing innovation and
problem solving, and thereby increasing firm productivity. Given the importance of manufacturing for
employment and structural transformation in Africa, we test the gender diversity-productivity proposition by exploring structural differences (heterogeneity) across manufacturing firms using the
without Smokestacks (IWOSS) classification. We find that while gender diversity promotes firm productivity at lower levels, this effect is displaced with further increases. Our results did not show that IWOSS
firms do any better in promoting the diversity-productivity link. Implications of this finding and areas for
future studies are also discussed.
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Research Article