Does move to market have an impact on earnings gap across gender? Some evidence from India

Abstract

We use Indian National Sample Survey employment-unemployment data for the urban sector for the years 1987 and 1999. Our results indicate that the gender wage gap had narrowed considerably between these two years, for all earnings deciles and for all education cohorts. The narrowing of the earnings gap can be attributed largely to a sharp increase in the returns to the labour market experience of women.

Removing the “Veil of Ignorance”: Nonlinearities in Education Effects on Gender Wage Inequalities

“…They also show that it is smaller by almost the exact same amount due to women's higher returns to education, relative to men. This surprising offsetting result has secured a loose consensus among scholars, and is also supported qualitatively by the findings of other studies using data from multiple years (e.g., Bhaumik and Chakrabarty ) . However, the study by Kingdon () of one state in India finds that on average men receive higher wages than women not only because they have more education but because they also receive a much higher return to their education compared to women.…”

“…Such a decomposition allows policymakers to learn the proportion of the gap that comes from differences in endowments between men and women (e.g., different education attainments) against the proportion that comes from differences in returns to endowments, perhaps due to discrimination (e.g., wage gaps for equally qualified workers of opposite gender). Some studies have used conditional quantile regression‐based approaches to explore distributional gender wage gaps (e.g., Bhaumik and Chakrabarty ). However, quantile regressions estimate the effect of determinants on the conditional distribution of wages and, therefore, are of limited use from a policy perspective in identifying unconditional effects of education on distributional gender gaps (Koenker and Bassett )…”

“…Moreover, most of the studies focus on the mean wage gap and ignore distributional issues. The few studies that consider distributional issues have failed to identify the role of individual covariates such as education in explaining wage gaps along male and female distributions (e.g., Bhaumik and Chakrabarty ). Despite the mixed findings, reducing the wage differentials continues to be a policy priority and represents an important dimension of women's empowerment and household welfare in the country (e.g., Duraisamy ).…”

Gender and caste-based wage discrimination in India: some recent evidence

“…Most studies on wage discrimination in the Indian labor market are based on data from different rounds of surveys conducted by the National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO). Divakaran (1996), Deshpande and Deshpande (1997), Kingdon (1997 and1998), Kingdon and Unni (2001), and Bhaumik and Chakrabarty (2008) examine gender-based discrimination. Banerjee and Knight (1985) and Madheswaran and Attewell (2007) examine caste-based discrimination for urban labor market; Gaiha et al (2007) for rural India; Ito (2009) for the rural sector of North India; and Kijima (2006) and Das and Dutta (2007) for all India.…”

“…However, they find that education contributes little to this discrimination. A study by Bhaumik and Chakrabarty (2008) using two rounds of the NSSO's employment-unemployment survey finds that the gender wage gap narrowed considerably between years 1987 and 1999. The narrowing of the earnings gap was attributed largely to a rapid increase in the returns to the labor market experience of women.…”