Gender, Wages, and Social Security in China’s Industrial Sector

Johanna Rickne

No 827, Working Paper Series from Research Institute of Industrial Economics

Abstract: This study compares average earnings and productivities for men and women employed in roughly 200,000 Chinese industrial enterprises. Women’s average wages lag behind men’s wages by 11%, and this result is robust to the inclusion of non-wage income in the form of social insurance payments. The gender-wage gap is wider among workers with more than 12 years of education (28%), mainly because of the higher relative wages received by skilled men in foreign-invested firms. Women’s average productivity falls behind men’s productivity by a larger margin than the gap in earnings, and the null-hypothesis of earnings discrimination is thereby rejected. Equal average wages between men and women are found among firms located in China’s Special Economic Zones, and also among some light industrial sectors with high shares of female employees. Market reform hence appears to have improved women’s relative incomes.

Keywords: China; Gender Wage Gap; Non-wage Compensation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I30 J16 J71 O10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 48 pages
Date: 2010-03-30
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna, nep-dev, nep-lab and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ifn.se/wfiles/wp/wp827.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Gender, Wages and Social Security in China’s Industrial Sector (2010)
Working Paper: Gender, Wages and Social Security in China’s Industrial Sector (2010)
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:hhs:iuiwop:0827

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Research Institute of Industrial Economics Research Institute of Industrial Economics, Box 55665, SE-102 15 Stockholm, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Elisabeth Gustafsson ().