The Right Tail and the Right Tale: The Gender Wage Gap in Mexico☆We thank Solomon Polachek, Konstantinos Tatsiramos and two anonymous referees as well as participants from the IZA Workshop on Gender Convergence in Bonn in April 2014 for helpful comments and suggestions. All errors are our own

Sonia Bhalotra, Manuel Fernandez Sierra and Atheendar S. Venkataramani

A chapter in Gender Convergence in the Labor Market, 2015, vol. 41, pp 299-341 from Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Abstract: We analyze the evolution of the gender wage gap in Mexico between 1989 and 2012, a period in which skill-biased technological change accelerated. We deviate from most prior work investigating the gap across the wage distribution. We find substantial gender wage convergence in the decade of the 2000s at the mean and, more markedly, at the upper and lower ends of the wage distribution, alongside little change in the median wage gap. The gender wage gap at the 90th percentile was largely eliminated by the year 2012 and, at the 10th percentile, it narrowed by a fourth of its 1990 level. This narrowing of gender inequality in wages occurred alongside a narrowing of inequality in wages within each gender group. The share of college-educated women relative to men in the work force grew substantially over the two decades, and they sorted disproportionately into brain-intensive occupations, where the gender wage gap fell sharply. The wage return to being in a brain-intensive occupation was, in both periods, greater for women; it declined for men while rising for women during the 2000s. Our findings demonstrate how structural economic change may interact with a biologically premised comparative advantage of women in brain-intensive occupations to raise their relative wages. Our results also underline the relevance of studying changes across the wage distribution.

Keywords: Gender wage gap; Mexico; skill-biased technological change; comparative advantage; skills; D3; J16; J31; O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (text/html)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... 7-912120140000041016
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (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:eme:rleczz:s0147-912120140000041016

DOI: 10.1108/S0147-912120140000041016

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Research in Labor Economics from Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Emerald Support ().