Contribution des inobservables aux disparités de genre dans la scolarisation et le travail des enfants au Mali

This study attempts to extend reflections on gender disparities in children's time allocation based on household survey data in Mali. We test the gender disparities in schooling and child labor using the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition. The objective is to identify the contributions of unobservable factors to the differences between girls and boys. Our results confirm the idea that most of the differences between the two groups comes from unobservable factors. We find, for example, that 92% of the difference in schooling remains unexplained based on observable characteristics. We also find evidence of a strong polarization of work by gender. Boys are significantly more oriented toward economic activities (1 hour per day girls) while girls are significantly more oriented toward non-economic activities (about 2.5 hours per day more than boys)