Gender, the State, and Informal Self-Employment: Perspectives from the Mobile Telecommunication Industry in Cameroon
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to examine the intersection of formality, informality, structures of power, gender, and social norms in the mobile telecommunication industry in Cameroon, and to investigate the reasons for the over-representation of informal self-employed women at the base of the mobile telecommunication industry in the country. Design/methodology/approach - This is a qualitative study using interviews and observations. Findings - Cameroon’s mobile telecommunication industry is a “spaghetti bowl” where formality, informality, gender, structures of power, and social norms are intertwined. In Cameroon’s mobile telecommunication industry, there is no static division between formality and informality, rather, there is a connection between formality and informality to ensure the unity and totality of the airtime credit distribution system. Self-employment in the mobile telecommunication industry is gendered. Originality/value - Analysing the intersection of gender, class, formality, informality, social norms, and structures of power in the functioning of the mobile telecommunication industry in the Cameroon is original.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".