Foreign direct investment and gender inequality: evidence from South Africa

We study an often-overlooked factor behind gender inequality: globalization, in particular, foreign direct investment (FDI). Building on a growing literature that studies the impact of trade and FDI on gender inequality, we test whether foreign-owned firms exhibit a different gender wage gap (GWG) than firms with domestic ownership, using unique South African administrative matched employer-employee data. We find that the unconditional GWG is substantially smaller in foreign-owned firms than in firms with domestic ownership. We also find that for foreign-owned firms this difference is reversed once we control for a large set of fixed effects. In our preferred specification, foreign-owned firms have a larger GWG of about 2.4 percentage points. The share of women employed in foreign firms is lower than in firms with domestic ownership, in contrast to similar studies, which may indicate an underlying inequality in opportunities for women within a developing country context.