The Economics of the Gender Wage Gap in Armenia

Rodriguez-Chamussy, Lourdes ; Sinha, Nistha ; Atencio, Andrea

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: GENDER WAGE GAP;    FEMALE LABOR FORCE PARTICIPATION;    LABOR MARKET;    POVERTY AND INEQUALITY;    GENDER GAP;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-8409
RP-ID  :  WPS8409

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

In Armenia, the proportion of womenamong employed workers increased from 45 to 48 percentbetween 2008 and 2015. This evolution was accompanied by afall in the gender earnings gap; however, the difference inaverage wages of men and women is still among the largest incomparison with countries in the Europe and Central Asiaregion. This study documents the gender wage gap in Armeniathrough stylized facts and further investigates its sources.The paper finds that the gender wage gap in hourly pay is 20percent on average. Looking at the different percentiles,the disparity in wages in Armenia in 2015 shows an invertedU-shaped form with a larger differential in wages betweenmen and women in the middle of the distribution. Using areweighted, re-centered influence function decomposition,the analysis estimates the contribution of each covariate onthe wage structure and composition effects along the wagedistribution. The decomposition shows that the wage gap inArmenia is mostly driven by the wage structure effect(unexplained component), which accounts for almost all thewage gap in the middle part of the distribution (30th to55th percentiles) and is even greater at the top, but betterendowments of women offset it to some extent. In the bottompart of the distribution however, the composition effect islarger, consistent with lower endowments among women, forexample, of skills and human capital.