A Meta-Analysis of the International Gender Wage Gap

Doris Weichselbaumer and Rudolf Winter-Ebmer

No 143, Economics Series from Institute for Advanced Studies

Abstract: Since the early seventies, hundreds of authors have calculated gender wage differentials between women and men of equal productivity. This meta-study provides a quantitative review of this vast amount of empirical literature on gender wage discrimination as it concerns differences in methodology, data, countries and time periods. We place particular emphasis on a proper consideration of the quality of the underlying study which is done by a weighting with quality indicators. The results show that data restrictions have the biggest impact on the resulting gender wage gap. Moreover, we are able to show what effect a misspecification of the underlying wage equation – like the frequent use of potential experience – has on the calculated gender wage gap. Over time, raw wage differentials world-wide have fallen substantially; however, most of this decrease is due to an increased labor market productivity of females.

Keywords: Gender wage differential; Meta-analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J16 J31 J71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2003-11
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (32)

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https://irihs.ihs.ac.at/id/eprint/1527 First version, 2003 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: A Meta‐Analysis of the International Gender Wage Gap (2005)
Working Paper: A Meta-Analysis of the International Gender Wage Gap (2003)
Working Paper: A Meta-Analysis of the International Gender Wage Gap (2003)
Working Paper: A meta-analysis of the international gender wage gap (2003)
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