Gender Differences in Socio-Emotional Skills and Economic Outcomes: New Evidence from 17 African Countries

Abstract

Using data from 41,873 individuals across 17 African countries, this paper examines gender differences in 10 socio-emotional skills and their relationship with education and earnings. Apart from self-control, the findings show a significant male advantage in self-reported skills, equivalent to the socio-emotional skill gained over 5.6 years of education. Closing the gender gap in education would close 17 percent of this gap. While overall socio-emotional skills and education are positively correlated for both men and women, the male advantage in socio-emotional skills increases at higher education levels. Socio-emotional skills are associated with higher earnings for both men and women. However, interpersonal skills are more strongly correlated with earnings for women, while gender gaps in those skills widen the most as education rises. The paper further discusses the implications of these results for interventions seeking to hone women’s socio-emotional skills for labor market success and to address the gender norms that may perpetuate gaps in socio-emotional skills.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 105 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.