Abstract
In this paper we investigate gender wage disparities in 25 EU countries before and after the crisis, focusing on the role employment protection legislation played in shaping the gap across the wage distribution. Results of quantile regressions reveal a remarkable cross-country diversity in the size of the gap and confirm the widespread existence of glass-ceiling effects. Stricter rules for temporary contracts mitigate the gender gap, especially at the top of the distribution; stronger protection for permanent workers is found to increase the gap at the bottom of the distribution and to decrease it at the middle and at the top.
Highlights
Labour market gender disparities have attracted a considerable attention in the European Union and their reduction has become a policy priority, to be achieved by encouraging female labour market participation, narrowing gender gaps in employment and unemployment rates and by mitigating pay gaps due to vertical and horizontal segregation and discriminatory practices
Using quantile regression methods we first show how the unexplained gender gap varies at different points of the hourly wage distribution
Among them we find Austria, Germany and the UK for Western Europe, where the adjusted pay gap is remarkably lower than the unadjusted measure, signalling that the raw gender gap was significantly driven by asymmetries in individual characteristics affecting productivity and wages
Summary
Our empirical analysis relies on the 2008 and 2013 releases of the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) (Eurostat 2015) cross-section samples. The huge gender gap in part-time employment, persistent, tended to decline for the majority of countries, due to an increase of the male rate This feature, along with a declining gender gap in temporary employment, anticipates one result of the following econometric analysis, i.e., that the reduction in the gender wage gap observed at the bottom of the distribution is mainly driven by the fact that, due to the crisis, man increasingly ended up in the lowest segment of the labour market (non standard contracts, at risk of low productivity, low pay traps), normally disproportionally populated by women.
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