Abstract
The period 2003–2007 was a period of economic and political changes for Ukraine. In 2005, following the Orange Revolution, the new government engaged in a series of economic reforms, among which was strengthening the legislation aimed at encouraging gender equality in the labor market. Using data from the Ukrainian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (ULMS) I explore the impact of these economic and political changes on the gender wage gap. Policies for gender equality seem to be responsible for at least part of the reduction of the wage gap among the workers of the public sector, both through the reduction in the differences between the remuneration of observable characteristics for men and women and through the reduction in horizontal and vertical segregation. On the other hand, the impact of these policies among workers of the private sector (and especially among the informally employed) seems much smaller, especially as far as the impact on horizontal and vertical segregation is concerned. This study utilizes the ULMS data set, a project initiated within the IZA-program “Labor Markets in Emerging and Transition Economies”. The project is financially supported by a consortium led by IZA, Bonn. The other permanent members of the consortium are CERT, Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh, EERC-Ukraine and RWI-Essen. Any opinions expressed here are those of the author and not those of ISET, University of Bologna or IZA institute.
Highlights
Two decades after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the beginning of transition, Ukraine is still a changing country
This was a sign of change and an important step in defense of one of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged groups of Ukrainian society in line with the international commitments subscribed by previous governments.1. In their 2005 study of the gender gap in Ukraine, Ganguli and Terrell welcomed this renewed interest towards gender equality and analyzed the evolution of the gender wage gaps from 1986 to 2003 in order to evaluate the distance of Ukraine from the European benchmarks of gender equality in the labor markets. They found that the mean gender gap in Ukraine - corrected for differences in the hours of work - was relatively higher than in other countries2 and it was higher especially in the public sector. (Pignatti 2011), analyzing 2003–2004 data, found that patterns of gender wage gaps in the formal and informal sectors of the economy differed, with the gender wage gap remaining largely unexplained in the formal sector and almost fully explained by individual and job characteristics in the informal one
The main goal of this paper is to study the evolution of the gender wage gap in the Ukrainian labor market in a period (2003–2007) characterized by the introduction of new regulations and institutions explicitly designed to promote gender equality
Summary
Two decades after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the beginning of transition, Ukraine is still a changing country. A number of acts of the new government concerned labor market legislation, with a particular emphasis on gender equality This was a sign of change and an important step in defense of one of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged groups of Ukrainian society in line with the international commitments subscribed by previous governments.. This was a sign of change and an important step in defense of one of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged groups of Ukrainian society in line with the international commitments subscribed by previous governments.1 In their 2005 study of the gender gap in Ukraine, Ganguli and Terrell welcomed this renewed interest towards gender equality and analyzed the evolution of the gender wage gaps from 1986 (with communism) to 2003 in order to evaluate the distance of Ukraine from the European benchmarks of gender equality in the labor markets. They found that the mean gender gap in Ukraine - corrected for differences in the hours of work - was relatively higher than in other countries and it was higher especially in the public sector. (Pignatti 2011), analyzing 2003–2004 data, found that patterns of gender wage gaps in the formal and informal sectors of the economy differed, with the gender wage gap remaining largely unexplained in the formal sector and almost fully explained by individual and job characteristics in the informal one
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