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

Isabelle Sin, Steven Stillman and Richard Fabling

No 10975, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: As in other OECD countries, women in New Zealand earn substantially less than men with similar observable characteristics. In this paper, we use a decade of annual wage and productivity data from New Zealand's Linked Employer-Employee Database to examine different explanations for this gender wage gap. Sorting by gender at either the industry or firm level explains less than one-fifth of the overall wage gap. Gender differences in productivity within firms also explain little of the difference seen in wages. The relationships between the gender wage-productivity gap and both age and tenure are inconsistent with statistical discrimination being an important explanatory factor for the remaining differences in wages. Relating across industry and over time variation in the gender wage-productivity gap to industry-year variation in worker skills, and product market and labor market competition, we find evidence that is consistent with taste discrimination being important for explaining the overall gender wage gap. Explanations based on gender differences in bargaining power are less consistent with our findings.

Keywords: gender wage gap; discrimination; sorting; productivity; competition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J16 J31 J71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2017-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-dem, nep-gen, nep-hme, nep-lma and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp10975.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: What drives the gender wage gap? Examining the roles of sorting, productivity differences, and discrimination (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:dp10975

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 ().