The Effects of Gender Inequality on Economic Development in Nigeria

This paper’s purpose is to identify if labour market gender inequality exists in Nigeria and how it affects the Nigerian economic growth. The objective of this study is to explore the impact of gender inequality in the labour market on economic growth of Nigeria for the period between 1991 and 2019 using time series data from World Development Indicators (WDI). The Augmented Dickey Fuller test and Phillip Perron test were carried out to test for the stationarity of the variables and examine the unit root property of the series. The autoregressive and distributed-lag bounds test was used to test for co-integration and also test for the long run relationship between the variables. The ARDL error correction mechanism was also carried out to test for the short run relationship between the variables. The results reveal that gender inequality exists in Nigeria’s labour market and we can conclude from the analysis provided using the equal opportunities and conditions approach, that fertility and female unemployment which represent gender inequality both have negative significant relationships with economic growth in Nigeria for both short run and long run periods and we can also conclude that female vulnerable employment and female wage and salaried workers’ rate have negative relationships with economic growth in the short run period and positive relationships with economic growth in the long run period. At the end of this study, we concluded that our results align with the feminist theory that was used for this study and gender inequality does indeed affect the economy negatively in terms of growth and development.