However, assuming that a pay gap exists whereby women earn lower wages, a second hypothesis is that the entry of women into the workforce lowers average wages and, hence, production costs. This implies that feminization contributes to growth but that this positive effect may be heightened by the existence of gender inequalities that may then remain in place because of the savings that they afford. The above result could be a combination of the effects of these two factors, but the findings discussed above indicate that, during the period under study, the former effect outweighed the latter except in the case of Brazil. The negative selection effects in the labour supply generated by the exclusion of some people from the labour market who could be participating in it but are not doing so (in this case, women) remained virtually unchanged during this period and, in fact, tended to increase.