THE GENDER WAGE GAP IN TURKEY

Year 2016, Volume: 38 Issue: 2, 1 - 19, 21.12.2016

Arda Aktaş Gokce Uysal

https://doi.org/10.14780/muiibd.280227

Cited By: 9

Abstract

The most prominent form of gender discrimination in the labor market is the gender gap in wages.

Using the Wage Structure Survey, a firm-level data set, we study the gender wage gap in Turkey. We

concentrate on formal employment as this is the jurisdiction of the Labor Code in Turkey. Although

women earn 3% less than men on average, a wider look reveals important differences along the entire

wage distribution. There is virtually no gender gap at the lower end of the wage distribution. More

surprisingly, women seem to earn about 5 percent more than men at the top. Using quantile regressions

which allow the study of the gender gap along the entire wage distribution, we find that women actually

earn 8 percent less at the median. Moreover, at the high end of the wage distribution women earn 4.5

percent less than men once we control for differences in basic labor market characteristics such as

education and labor market experience. The decomposition results reveal the unexplained part of the

gender wage gap is actually larger than that observed in raw data.

Keywords

Gender wage gap, Quantile Regression, Machado-Mata Decomposition

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