EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The gender wage gap across the wage distribution in Japan: Within- and between-establishment effects

Hiromi Hara

Labour Economics, 2018, vol. 53, issue C, 213-229

Abstract: Although male and female wages have been converging, there still remains a persistent gender wage gap in many countries. To identify what impedes further reductions in this gap, we used Japanese data to conduct a decomposition across the wage distribution, focusing on the wage structure effect, which is the portion of the gender wage gap that is unexplained by gendered differences in human capital. We show that the wage structure effect is larger within an establishment than between establishments and at the tails of the wage distribution than in the middle, indicating that both a glass ceiling and a sticky floor exist within establishments and have for more than 25 years. The sticky floor appears to be largely caused by Japan’s gendered career track job segregation system and the glass ceiling by a gender promotion gap and a “swimming upstream” phenomenon. Consequently, any further reduction in the gender wage gap will require a resolution of gender job segregation and a shift towards jobs that reward flexibility.

Keywords: Gender wage gap; Glass ceiling; Sticky floor; Within- and between-establishments; Gendered job segregation; Gender promotion gap (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J16 J24 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (33)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0927537118300368
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:labeco:v:53:y:2018:i:c:p:213-229

DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2018.04.007

Access Statistics for this article

Labour Economics is currently edited by A. Ichino

More articles in Labour Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:eee:labeco:v:53:y:2018:i:c:p:213-229