Female Education and Employment in Nigeria

This paper examined female education and employment in Nigeria. The 2018 Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey data (NDHS, 2018) was used. After sorting out for missing data, 28,494 women’s individual data were used. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and Multinomial logit regression. Only 0.3% of women in Nigeria are unemployed while 99.7% are employed in skilled and unskilled jobs. However, only 13.4% of the women are engaged in skilled employment; 8.5% are in professional/technical/managerial jobs while 4.9% are involved in skilled manual. The majority (86.3%) are in the unskilled manual employment category; 1.6% in clerical, 49.4% in sales, 9.5% in services, 0.1% in unskilled manual and 25.7% in Agriculture. The likelihood of being involved in professional/technical/managerial employment by women in Nigeria increases with age (0.06), region {North West (1.18), South West (1.87}, educational level {secondary (0.68), tertiary (1.64)}, wealth index{richer (0.90), ri-chest(0.95)}. On the other hand, the likelihood of being engaged in professional/technical/managerial employment type reduces with large household size >10persons (-0.71). Engagement of women in skilled employment types are driven by education while education discourages them in engaging in unskilled employment types. However, because the highest proportion of the women have secondary education, they are found more in the unskilled employment types. Also, engagement in skilled employment types is driven by wealth index while age drives skilled and unskilled employment types. Nigerian women are not much involved in skilled employment, the right policy should be put in place to educate girls beyond the secondary education level and enlighten them on the need to be involved in skilled employment.


Introduction
Gender is an essential component in the subject of employment distribution because it has been demonstrated that gender influences employment choice (Lambin and Nyyssölä, (2022).Enfield, 2019).Throughout history, women have been engaged in the society mainly in domestic responsibilities.They have been known to be caregivers and they rarely get involved in the economy or when they do, they take jobs with low-incomes.According to a report by the International Labour Organization (ILO, 2010), 48.8 percent of female were inactive in the labour market globally compared to 22.3 percent of male, implying that percentage of female employed globally was considerably lower than that of males.This is due to a variety of variables, the most significant of which is gender bias, which causes women to prioritize domestic duties (Kee et al. 2020).This affects girl child education negatively, and thus, the skills that can be acquired for engagement in skilled employment.
Even though women's participation in the labour market has increased (Lincoln, 2012), there are significant inequalities in the types of occupations that women pursue.Women are involved in farm operations in 73.15 percent of cases and nonfarm business activities in 26.85% of cases (Enfield, 2019); farming, fishing, and forestry are the primary agricultural while manufacturing, sales, and services are the primary off-farm activities.
Women have also gained more positions in administrative, clerical, personal services, and sales occupations in recent years, as well as in law, medicine, and accounting, but no equivalent change has occurred in managerial occupations (Women's Working Group, 2005).
Several factors were found to be the cause of low female participation in the labour market; low level of education and lack of skills that will enable women to participate in high income jobs.Other characteristics that have been linked to gender and employment choice include reproductive responsibilities, lack of child-care facilities, cultural discrimination and religious values and area of residence (Enfield, 2019), which can all be grouped as socioeconomic factors.This paper examines female education and employment in Nigeria.The specific objectives are to: i. Assess female employment in Nigeria ii.Describe Nigerian Women in skilled and unskilled employment types.
iii.Examine the factors influencing female employment in Nigeria.

Theoretical Review: The Neoclassical Theory
The rationality of employers and workers is central to neo-classical economists' analysis of segregated labour markets.Workers choose appropriate employment after considering their endowment levels, restrictions, and preferences.According to this reasoning, similarly, employers, as profit-maximizing actors, will pay workers the value of their marginal product.The interaction of these two factors results in competitive and efficient labour markets (Krueger, 1963;Arrow, 1973;Arrow, 2014).According to this hypothesis, women employees are paid less because they have less human capital, are less likely to participate in the labour market, and have little skill and training earned throu-ghout their employment.These considerations lead women to pursue economic activities that reflect their limitations and preferences, such as low-paying jobs, flexible work, part-time work, and so on.Women's "improved" working conditions are meant to be compensated for by lower monetary rewards.According to Becker (1957);Becker 2010;Neumark (2018) ;Schmader, (2023) and Ehrenberg et al.(2021).if a person has a taste for discrimination, he should act as though he would be prepared to pay something, either directly or indirectly in the form of a lower salary, to be associated with some people rather than others.Individual preferences and prejudices contribute to the taste for discriminating.Due to the challenges connected with employing women, such as maternity leaves and inflexible nature, employers are willing to forgo profit to avoid female workers by paying higher amounts to higher male workers.However, a major flaw in neo-classical theory is that it does not investigate the underlying mechanisms that prevent women from making different choices.Are there social-cultural norms that have an impact on women's human capital?Women, for example, are unable to compete on an equal footing with men because they typically lack the necessary knowledge.

Empirical Review: Employment and Gender
Gender Discrimination and Employment Opportunities in Nigerian Manufacturing Companies were investigated by Efanga et al. (2021).From the findings, gender has a favorable and significant impact on career chances.Employment opportunities are strongly influenced by one's age and educational level.Organizations should continue to promote equal employment opportunities for all genders in terms of career growth, encourage employment of people of various ages, and ensure that people with the right mix of qualifications are hired based on their individual qualifications.Luci (2019) studied how economic growth affects the dynamics of gender disparity in the workplace.Economic research implies that female labour market participation has a beneficial impact on growth, but the impact of growth on female labour market participation is less obvious.This implies that relying on the equalizing impacts of economic growth to promote women's participation in the labour market is insufficient in the short term.In order to enhance women's labour market participation and general economic growth, active labour market policies are required, particularly in developing nations.Iweagu (2012) found that female labour participation had remained essentially unchanged since 2004 and explored the present factors affecting female labour participation.The determinants of female labour participation in urban and rural settings were discovered to be different.Findings showed that in the rural sector, marital status, religion, poverty rate, and per capita income are important variables, but in the urban sector, age and literacy rate are the important drivers.Because the drivers of female labour participation in urban areas differ significantly from those in rural areas, it was recommended that discriminatory policies be promoted while developing policies to improve female labour participation in Nigeria.

Methodology
The scope of this paper is Nigeria.The 2018 Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey data (NDHS, 2018) was used.NDHS 2018 is the sixth survey to be implemented by the National Population Commission.The other five surveys were done in the years 1999, 2003, 2008 and 2013.The 2018 data is a national sample survey that provides up-to-date information on demographic and health indicators.The sample was selected using a stratified, two-stage cluster design, with enumeration areas (EAs) as the sampling units for the first stage.The second stage was a complete listing of households carried out in each of the 1,400 selected EAs.The target groups were women aged 15-49 and men aged 15-59 in randomly selected households across Nigeria (NPC and ICF, 2019).A total of 40,427 households, 41,821 women (15-49years) and 13,311 men (15-59years) were successfully interviewed.After sorting out for missing data, 28,494 women individual data were used.

Analytical Techniques
The analytical techniques used in the study are descriptive statistics and Multinomial logit regression.Descriptive statistics involves the use of frequency counts, percentages, and means.Results are presented in frequency distribution tables.

Multinomial Logistic regression (MNL)
Multinomial Logistic regression was used to determine the factors influencing female employment in Nigeria.

Socio-economic characteristics of Nigerian women
The socio-economic characteristics of women in Nigeria are presented in Table 1.The mean age of Nigerian women is 31±12 years with more than half (51%) ranging between 31-60years and 49% being ≤30years.Majority (75%) are married, while less than 5% are widowed/divorced.Marriage could play a positive role in helping women get more education, thus getting well paid jobs.This could happen if a woman has a supporting partner.About 32% of women have no formal education while 18% have primary education.However, 39.3% have secondary education while 11% have tertiary education.More women have secondary education than other educational levels.It is believed that after secondary school education, a woman can learn a trade so that she can marry early to raise a family.
Most women (81%) live in male-headed households and 49% are in small sized households.The mean household size for women is 6±4persons.In Nigeria, 20 out of 100 women are from North Central, 19 out of 100 from North West, 17 out of 100 from North East, 15 out of 100 from South West.About 59% of women in Nigeria reside in the rural areas.Also, about 23% of the women are in the middle and richer wealth quantile.

Female Employment in Nigeria
The different employment types that Nigerian women are involved in are presented in Table 2. Employment types were grouped under no employment, skilled employment and unskilled employment.In the skilled employment category, the job types include Professional/technical/ managerial and skilled manual.The job types in the unskilled category are clerical, sales, services, unskilled manual and agriculture.From the results, only 0.3% of women in Nigeria are not employed, while 99.7% are employed in the skilled and unskilled jobs.This implies that Nigeran women are working.However, only 13.4% of the women are engaged in skilled employment; 8.5% are in professional/technical/managerial jobs, while 4.9% are involved in skilled manual.
The majority (86.3%) are in the unskilled manual employment category; 1.6% are in clerical, 49.4% in sales, 9.5% in services, 0.1% in unskilled manual and 25.7% in Agriculture.More women in the skilled jobs category are involved in professional/ technical/managerial jobs.Also, in the unskilled jobs category, there are more women in sales.An average woman in Nigeria is enterprising, some women get involved with trading (sales) as early as in primary school when they hawk for their mothers.Women are also involved in Agriculture.It is evident from literature that 70% of smallholder farmers are women (Sabo et al. 2017).

Nigerian Women in skilled and unskilled employment types
The decomposition of the employment categories across socio-economic characteristics is presented in Table 3.This is to describe women in the employment categories.The majority (78.9%) of women who are not employed are the younger ones (≤30years) and the young ones are also involved more with skilled employment (53.4%).This is quite understandable as women in this category are young and are still in school or learning a trade.Even with the high unemployment rate, most university graduates in this age category are still hunting for jobs or learning a trade.Older women (31-60 years) are more involved in unskilled employment (51.3%).
The highest proportion (51.3%) of married women in the study are unemployed followed by 42.1% of single women.Also, married women have the highest percentage of those involved in skilled (69.2%) and unskilled employment (75.8%).North Central zone has the highest percentage (26.3%) of women who are unemployed, South West zone has the highest percentage (28.5%) of women who are involved in skilled employment and North West zone has the highest percentage (20.1%) of women who are involved in unskilled employment.
A higher percentage (64.5%) of women in rural Nigeria are unemployed, 61.6% of women in skilled employment group are in urban Nigeria (Mitra,2005).This is because majority of the establishments that need the services of skilled workers are in urban areas.Also, 62% of women in the unskilled group reside in rural areas.Majority of the women who are unemployed (80.3%), employed in skilled (79.4%) and unskilled (81.4%) jobs are in male headed households.Women with secondary education has the highest percentage (46.1%) of those that are unemployed.This is true because Nigerian women, after secondary education, further their education to get a university degree or are learning a trade.Also, higher percentages of women with secondary education are involved in skilled employment (41.7%) and unskilled employment (38.9%).Higher proportions of women in the three employment categories are in small sized households (1-5 persons).When women care for more people in their households, they have less time to focus on themselves and their jobs (Sirianni & Negrey 2000).From the results on wealth index, higher proportion (39.5%) of women who are in the unemployed category are poor.The highest percentage (68.9%) of women in the skilled employment category are richer because they are empowered and get more money from their jobs while 22.5% of women in unskilled employment category are in the middle class.

Factors influencing female employment in Nigeria
Tables 4a and 4b show results on factors influencing female employment in Nigeria.Multinomial regression results show a maximum likelihood of -31416.733,LR χ2 of 15185.98,Prob.Wχ2 (0.0000), which is significant at 1 percent (P<0.01).The employment types used in this regression are Professional/Technical/Managerial, skilled manual, clerical, Sales, Services, unskilled manual, and agriculture.

Professional/technical/managerial employment type
The likelihood of being engaged in professional/ technical/managerial employment type increases with age (0.06) but decreases for a woman with a large household size of more than 10persons (-0.71).It will be almost impossible to take care of more than ten persons in the household and be able to cope in this kind of job.London (2014)

Sales employment type
Furthermore, the likelihood of being engaged in sales employment type increases with age (0.05), region {North West (1.26),South West (1.83)}, marital status {married (0.93)} while it decreases with tertiary level of education (-1.45).Women do not require a high level of education to be involved in this type of employment.Most of the time, women with no formal education do well in their trade as they have learned the tricks from their mother/father or a trainer (Yasunaga, 2014;Grajcevci & Shala 2016).

Services employment type
The likelihood of engaging in services employment type increases in South West region (1.63) and wealth index {middle (0.77), richer (1.03), richest (1.09)}.

Skilled manual employment type
The likelihood of being engaged in skilled manual employment type increases in North East (0.61) and South West (2.07); marital status {ma-rried (0.67); wealth index{richer(0.99),richest(1.25)while it decreases with tertiary level of education(-1.40) .
Age seems to be a common positive factor across all the employment types.This may probably be that as age increases women stick with their jobs and gain more experience in it.Ortiz-Ospina et al.( 2024) affirmed in their study that female labour participation varies across age in countries considered in this study.Younger women could be more involved and older women could be more involved too or vice versa.For agricultural employment, women are highly involved in Agriculture in South East and in the rural areas.In the South East, it is a normal occurrence for women to farm and support their households.Practising agriculture would be hard in the Northern region because of the high level of insecurity in this region particularly in North East.Poverty is a common occurrence in Agriculture in Nigeria, women in this job need to do much work to break even (Jiggins, 1989;Anyanwu, 2010).This is because agricultural practice in Nigeria is still crude.driven by wealth index while age drives all skilled and unskilled employment types.Nigerian women are not much involved in skilled employment.The right policy should be put in place to educate girls beyond the secondary education level and enli-ghten them on the need to be involved in skilled employment..The age limit of women in the data used 15-49years.Information was not provided for older women >49years.This scope of this study was limited because of this.

Table 1 :
Socio economic characteristics of Nigerian women

Table 3 :
Description of Nigerian Women in skilled and unskilled employment types The level of education in South West is high because of the introduction of free education in the 1970s by Chief Obafemi Awolowo.Girls are sent to school because of the high level of exposure of families in this region.

Table 3 :
Description of Nigerian Women in skilled and unskilled employment types

Table 3 :
Description of Nigerian Women in skilled and unskilled employment types