Analysis of Gender Wage Differential in China's Urban Labor Market

Biwei Su () and Almas Heshmati ()

No 6252, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper estimates the gender wage gap and its composition in China's urban labor market using the 2009 survey data from the Chinese Family Panel Studies. Several estimation and decomposition methods have been used and compared. First, we examine the gender wage gap using ordinary least square regression method with a gender dummy variable. Then, we apply Oaxaca (1973) decomposition method with different weighting systems to analyze the logarithmic wage differential. To be more specific, we prove the existence of sample selection bias caused by the female's labor force participation. We eliminate it by using the Heckman's two-step procedure. Empirical results reveal that male workers generally receive a higher wage than female workers, and a great deal of this difference is unexplained. Meanwhile, this unexplained part, which is usually referred to as discrimination turns out to be higher when the adjustment is made for the selection bias. A further breakdown of the wage gap shows that among all the individual characteristics, occupations explain the largest share of the wage gap, followed by their working experience. On the other hand, education acts as a contributor for discrimination in the labor market.

Keywords: discrimination; wage gap; decomposition; gender; Chinese labor market (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J16 J31 J70 J78 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2011-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna, nep-dev, nep-lab, nep-lma, nep-ltv and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published - published in: Singapore Economic Review, 2017, 62 (2), 423-445

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp6252.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: ANALYSIS OF GENDER WAGE DIFFERENTIAL IN CHINA’S URBAN LABOR MARKET (2017)
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:iza:izadps:dp6252

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().