This paper investigates the extent of gender earnings gap among informal labor market workers in Cameroon. We have used the 2010 employment and informal sector survey, the Heckman two‐step bivariate selection model, and the Neuman–Oaxaca–Ransom decomposition framework to address these concerns. We find that, compared to men, women are more likely to make the joint decision of participating in the labor market and choosing informal work. Findings also reveal that among informal workers, male workers have an earnings premium over their female counterparts. Returns to informal labor market experience are solidly consistent in narrowing the gender earnings gap. Among the self‐employed workers, male workers also enjoy an earnings premium. However, when the inverse Mills ratio is decomposed, the overall and the self‐employed gender discrimination virtually disappears. Meanwhile, female wage earners enjoy a wage premium and have an unambiguous education‐based advantage over their male counterparts. The implications of these findings support the wisdom that promoting the human capital development of the girl child would play a vital role in alleviating gender‐based differentials by eroding sociocultural conventions and advancing women's agency.

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Cameroon’s informal labour market largely harbours female workers, engaged mainly in low-productivity and low-paying jobs. We investigate the sticky-floor - a wider earnings-gap at the top end of the earnings-distribution and glass-ceiling phenomena - a wider earnings-gap at the bottom in the informal labour market as a whole and across its segments. We use the 2010 Cameroon labour market survey and a framework that enables us to account for selectivity bias, resolve the index number problem of the standard decomposition, and examine earnings differentials across the unconditional earnings distribution. We find compelling evidence of a sticky-floor phenomenon in the informal labour market manifested essentially among wage earners. Returns to experience mitigate the gender earnings gap at the mean, and 10th and 50th percentiles of the unconditional earnings distribution. Female workers have an unambiguous human-capital-based advantage over their male counterparts at the mean, lower tail, and median of the distribution.

Cameroon’s informal labour market largely harbours female workers, engaged mainly in low-productivity and low-paying jobs. We investigate the sticky floor and glass ceiling phenomena in the informal labour market as a whole and across its segments. We use the 2010 Cameroon labour market survey, employing the recentred influence function and blending the Oaxaca-Ransom and Neuman-Oaxaca decomposition methods. The resulting framework enables us to account for selectivity bias at the mean, resolve the index number problem of the standard decomposition, and examine earnings differentials across the unconditional earnings distribution. We find compelling evidence of a sticky floor phenomenon in the informal labour market manifested essentially among wage earners. Returns to experience mitigate the gender earnings gap at the mean, and 10th and 50th percentiles of the unconditional earnings distribution. Female workers have an unambiguous human-capital-based advantage over their male counterparts at the mean, lower tail, and median of the distribution.

This paper investigates the implications of the 2008 minimum wage review for labor supply using the 2005 and 2010 Cameroon labor force surveys. Specifically, it assesses the extent, depth, and severity of minimum wage violations in the Cameroon labor market, and evaluates the impact of the 2008 minimum wage review on labor supply in Cameroon between 2005 and 2010. To achieve these objectives, use is made of the violation class of indices, bivariate probit, and the control function. Empirical results show that minimum wage violation is more prevalent, deeper, and severer among rural (female) workers than their urban (male) counterparts. Results also confirm a direct relationship between engaging in the formal sector and labor supply over the period 2005–2010 and participating in the formal sectoincreasesse the hours of work. These findings are in tandem with the wisdom that the Cameroon government could adopt a compliance-enhancing strategy that needs to be comprehensive, addressing issues throughout the design, adjusting, and implementing the minimum wage policies especially in the informal sector, rural areas, and deprived female groups.