Gender Wage Gap in Regional Turkish Labor Markets: Nuts1 Regions

Abstract

This paper investigates the gender wage gap at a regional level for NUTS 1 in Turkey and the factors contributing to this gap through an analysis of 2019 TURKSAT Household Labor Force Survey data and a Machado-Mata decomposition analysis. The paper reveals variations in the wage gap between men and women in different regions, and also in the contributing factors and finds further that the direction and dimensions of the gender wage gap change across the wage distribution. In some regions, among lower wage groups, the gender wage gap and one particular component of this gap discrimination favors women. In every region, however, women in the higher wage groups are subject to wage discrimination, and this is intensified in many regions towards the distribution's upper tail, creating a glass ceiling. In the regional labor market, therefore, the experiences of women at different socioeconomic levels can vary.