present women's

Gender analyses of labour markets tend to look at women’s participation in paid employment compared with men’s – and not the huge informal sector in which so many women work; selling a handful of tomatoes that they have grown in their gardens, picking cotton or sewing at night long after their children have gone to bed. The number of women owning small and medium-sized businesses is estimated to be between 8 million and 10 million, and although this is still far fewer than that for men owning similar enterprises, numbers are slowly growing. In most countries, the informal sector is far larger than the formal one. For example, in south Asia more than 80% of men and women work in the informal sector, and in sub-Saharan Africa it is 74% of women and 61% of men.