Is There a Glass Ceiling over Europe? Exploring the Gender Pay Gap across the Wage Distribution

Abstract

Is There a Glass Ceiling over Europe? Exploring theGender Pay Gap across the Wages Distribution * Using harmonised data from the European Union Household Panel, we analyse gender pay gaps by sector across the wages distribution for ten countries. We find that the mean gender pay gap in the raw data typically hides large variations in the gap across the wages distribution. We use quantile regression (QR) techniques to control for the effects of individual and job characteristics at different points of the distribution, and calculate the part of the gap attributable to differing returns between men and women. We find that, first, gender pay gaps are typically bigger at the top of the wage distribution, a finding that is consistent with the existence of glass ceilings. For some countries gender pay gaps are also bigger at the bottom of the wage distribution, a finding that is consistent with sticky floors. Third, the gender pay gap is typically higher at the top than the bottom end of the wage distribution, suggesting that glass ceilings are more prevalent than sticky floors and that these prevail in the majority of our countries. Fourth, the gender pay gap differs significantly across the public and the private sector wages distribution for each of our EU countries.JEL Classification: J16, J31, J7

Noncognitive skills, occupational attainment, and relative wages

“…Albrecht et al (2003), for example, find that the occupational distribution explains more of the gender wage gap among high-wage than low-wage Swedish workers. Barón and Cobb-Clark (2010) find similar results for Australian women in both private-and public-sector employment, while Arulampalam et al (2007) find the same for some (though not all) European countries. Although we do not present the results here, we investigated this issue by re-estimating our model for women with high versus low educational attainment.…”

“…We believe that a model of discrimination against women -rather than favouritism towards men -provides the more interesting counterfactual for our purposes (see Arulampalam et al, 2007;Neumark, 1988).…”

“…This approach, however, makes the strong assumption that the distribution of men's and women's employment across occupations is exogenous. Moreover, using this approach to estimate the extent of labour market discrimination is appropriate only to the extent that gender segregation stems from individuals' unobserved human capital or job preferences rather than from discriminatory factors (see for example, Arulampalam et al, 2007;Miller, 1987). In contrast, we adopt the approach proposed by Brown et al (1980) which extends the traditional Oaxaca (1973) and Blinder (1973) decomposition to account for the role of gender differences in occupational attainment in producing the overall gap in relative wages.…”

Counterfactual distributions with sample selection adjustments: Econometric theory and an application to the Netherlands

“…between the genders and a component due to the difference in the distributions of rewards to these characteristics between the genders. Such studies include Albrecht, Björklund, and Vroman (2003) for Sweden, de la Rica, Dolado, and Llorens (2007) for Spain, and Arulampalam, Booth, and Bryan (2007) across several European countries.…”

Decomposing body mass index gaps between Mediterranean countries: A counterfactual quantile regression analysis

“…The method estimates the marginal density function of BMI in a given country implied by different counterfactual distributions of all the covariates included. This counterfactual decomposition approach has been developed by Machado and Mata (2005) and repeatedly applied to the analysis of changes in the wage schedule across time and space (Garcia et al, 2001;Albrecht et al, 2003;Melly, 2005;Arulampalam et al, 2007). The methodology is applied here to an analysis of the variation in the BMI distribution in Spain with respect to Italy in the year 2003.…”