Gender Wage Discrimination and Poverty in the EU

Carlos Gradín (), Coral del Rio Otero and Olga Cantó

Feminist Economics, 2010, vol. 16, issue 2, 73-109

Abstract: This paper analyzes the role of gender wage discrimination in household poverty rates in several European Union (EU) countries using the European Community Household Panel. In order to quantify the impact of discrimination on poverty, it proposes the construction of a counterfactual distribution of wages where discrimination against women has been removed. Using this new wage distribution, the study computes total household income and compares poverty rates in the absence of discrimination to those actually observed. The results show that, in general, discrimination against women plays a determinative role in the current levels of poverty in EU countries, although results by country show that this role differs in intensity and pattern. Further, the study finds that in EU countries the effect of discrimination on poverty risk dramatically increases for individuals in households that largely depend on working women' earnings.

Keywords: Income distribution; labor participation; gender; inequality; poverty; wage discrimination (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13545701003731831 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:femeco:v:16:y:2010:i:2:p:73-109

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RFEC20

DOI: 10.1080/13545701003731831

Access Statistics for this article

Feminist Economics is currently edited by Diana Strassmann

More articles in Feminist Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().