What Drives the Gender Wage Gap? Examining the Roles of Sorting, Productivity Differences, Bargaining, and Discrimination

Isabelle Sin, Steven Stillman and Richard Fabling

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2022, vol. 104, issue 4, 636-651

Abstract: As in other OECD countries, women in New Zealand earn substantially less than men with similar observable characteristics. In this paper, we use fifteen years of linked employer-employee data to examine different explanations for this gender wage gap. We find an overall gender wage gap between 20% and 28%, of which gender differences in sorting across occupations explain 9%, across industries 16% to 19%, and across firms 5% to 9%, respectively. The remaining within-firm gender wage gap is still between 13% and 17%. Around 5 percentage points of this are explained by women being less willing to bargain or less successful at bargaining to capture firm-specific rents. Gender differences in productivity also explain at most 4.5 percentage points of this remaining gap. These results suggest that taste discrimination is also important for explaining why women are paid less than their relative contribution to firm output. Across-industry and over-time variation in the gender wage-productivity gap further support this conclusion.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1162/rest_a_01000
Access to PDF 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:tpr:restat:v:104:y:2022:i:4:p:636-651

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().