Abstract
The gender wage gap and its development in urban China are analysed utilising two large-scale surveys covering ten provinces for the years 1988 and 1995. The results indicate that from an international perspective, the gender wage gap in urban China appears to be relatively small. It is, however, increasing. Decompositions based on estimated regression models show that somewhat less than half of the average gender wage gap can be attributed to differences in variables but much less of its increase. The earnings situation of young women and women with limited education has especially deteriorated if compared to men having the same characteristics.
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Notes
- 1.
Knight and Song (1993) use the same data for 1988.
- 2.
SSB (1995a) reports the following point estimates referring to persons of the urban population 15–64 years of age: Urban women (men) spend on paid work 7 h and 7 min (7 h and 30 min) and on housework 4 h and 23 min (2 h and 10 min). Rural women (men) are reported to spend on out of household work 5 h and 46 min (7 h and 13 min) and on housework 5 h and 11 min (2 h and 14 min).
- 3.
White et al. (1996, p. 72) reports results from an investigation on opinions made in two cities point in this direction. Furthermore a general perception was found that the government was not active in addressing this issue.
- 4.
- 5.
It seems as though the Chinese have differing opinions on the existence of earnings discrimination. White et al. (1996, pp. 71–72) reports result from a survey of opinions made in two cities where the proportion of respondents agreeing that women receive lower pay than men was as large as the proportion who felt that there was no such discrimination.
- 6.
We have found a considerably higher gender wage gap for urban China than Qian (1996) who reported it to be 9%. Thus we do not share her conclusion that China has by far the smallest gender wage gap observed in the world (p. 114). One explanation for the differences between the studies is that the gender earnings gap is smaller in the two provinces in her study (which also are included in our study). We report in Table 4 for 1995 a gender earnings gap of 14% in Beijing and 15% in Guangdong to be compared to 18% for urban China as a whole. In addition there are differences in definitions between the studies. For example our study is on earning and we include the self-employed while her study is on wages excluding self-employed.
- 7.
In a sensitivity analysis we dropped variables indicating occupation and economic sector from the earnings functions but received similar results. The gender earnings gap due to differences in mean values accounts to 43.8% in 1988 while it dropped to 36.4% in 1995.
- 8.
We do not have evidence as to why the increases are largest for those categories so explanations have to be speculative. First looking at young workers one can notice that they have been hired recently. It is therefore most likely that any increased preference among employer to hire male workers is strongest for this category. Therefore in order to get a job young female workers have (probably) been increasingly willing to accept lower wages (than males). Turning to the category of people with a short education one can notice that much work done by such people is physically demanding. Women might be less productive performing many such tasks, and this might be an important reason why the “discrimination index” has increased for this category.
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Gustafsson, B., Li, S. (2022). Economic Transformation and the Gender Earnings Gap in Urban China. In: Goulart, P., Ramos, R., Ferrittu, G. (eds) Global Labour in Distress, Volume II. Palgrave Readers in Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89265-4_6
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