Gender Wage Gap and Segregation in Late Transition

Abstract

Transition countries hoping to join the European Union are in the process of introducing western-type anti-discrimination policies aimed at reducing the gender wage gap. The efficacy of these policies depends on the relative size of the gap's elements they target; therefore, it is important to quantify these parts. In this paper, large matched employer-employee data sets from the Czech Republic and Slovakia are used to provide such detailed gender wage gap decomposition. The results, based on 1 998 data, suggest that various forms of employment segregation are related to over one third of the overall pay difference between genders in both countries. In the non-public sector, however, almost two thirds of the total gap remains attributable to the individual's sex, suggesting much of the gap is due to violations of the equal pay policy.