Gender Wage Gap in Rural Bangladesh: Assessing the Sticky Floor or Glass Ceiling Phenomenon and Its Determinants

Yoshimichi Murakami and Nur Nahar Yasmin
Additional contact information
Nur Nahar Yasmin: Faculty of Business Studies, University of Dhaka, BANGLADESH

No DP2025-26, Discussion Paper Series from Research Institute for Economics & Business Administration, Kobe University

Abstract: This paper empirically examines the determinants of the gender wage gap across the wage distribution in rural Bangladesh, applying the Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition to the unconditional quantile regression approach. Using panel data from three rounds (2011–12, 2015, and 2019) of the Bangladesh Integrated Household Survey, this study controls for both household-level unobserved heterogeneity and selection bias in rural wage employment. Results reveal that the gender wage gap is most pronounced at the lower end of the distribution, providing strong evidence of the sticky floor phenomenon. We find that larger return to education and coefficient of full-time employment for females significantly contributed to a reduced wage gap at the upper end of the distribution, while larger return to education and coefficient of non-agricultural employment for females contributed to narrowing the wage gap at the lower end. Notably, as education is associated with a higher probability of wage employment for females, the contribution of education becomes stronger after controlling for selectivity bias. The findings suggest that promoting female education and expanding access to non-agricultural employment are key to reducing the gender wage gap in rural Bangladesh, although unobservable factors continue to perpetuate the sticky floor phenomenon.

Keywords: Education; Decomposition; Household fixed effects; Gender wage gap; Rural Bangladesh; Unconditional quantile regression (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I24 I26 J31 J71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2025-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-lma and nep-sea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.rieb.kobe-u.ac.jp/academic/ra/dp/English/DP2025-26.pdf First version, 2025 (application/pdf)

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:kob:dpaper:dp2025-26

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Paper Series from Research Institute for Economics & Business Administration, Kobe University 2-1 Rokkodai, Nada, Kobe 657-8501 JAPAN. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Office of Promoting Research Collaboration, Research Institute for Economics & Business Administration, Kobe University ().