“The Winning Couple: Formal Wife and Informal Husband”

A large fraction of literature has devoted to gender studies, differences between sexes in the labor market are an established fact. Meanwhile, informality is large and persistent for most developing countries. Some authors link the women’s vulnerability and their customary child care activities, carried out by women, to higher rates of informality by women. However, recent trends in middle-income countries may pose a challenge to such results as women may be choosing formal jobs, over passing men. We present such result for the Colombian case, by using the NTA-gender methodology and a review of educational attainment, child labor and labor market statistics by gender. The massive increase in female education, the proliferation of child labor in paid activities, that “favor” boys over girls, and the rampant growth of the informal market, that includes illegal and profitable activities in Colombia, drive gender segregated decisions with the formal/informal duality in an unexpected way. That is, women working in the formal sector earn almost as much as men working in the informal sector. But women show at all ages larger consumption patterns of health, for which they prefer formal jobs that guarantee access to the social security system for them and their kids.