From the ground up: Gender, space, and self-employment in a Colombian housing project

Abstract

Researchers have documented a persistent wage gap between self-employed men and women. In this paper, we identify a novel intervention that boosts women's earnings and reduces this gap in an informal, residential marketplace. We argue that micro-spatial resources offer specific, gendered advantages to female business owners. We show how gendered constraints on women's labor market activity intersect with spatial resources to powerfully influence their likelihood of running a home-based business and their self-employment earnings. Using data from a Colombian public housing complex, we find that the randomly assigned location of a resident's apartment significantly influences women's business activity, but not men's. Women who run informal, home-based businesses from favorable locations earn more than twice as much as comparable women, close the gender earnings gap in self-employment by 58.5%, and earn an income that lifts them above the poverty line. Overall, this study offers a new perspective on how gender and micro-geography intersect to shape self-employment, and shows how self-employment can function as a lever for women's economic mobility in developing countries.