Abstract
This chapter explores the gender wage gap across the four Asian countries: Japan, Singapore, South Korean, and Taiwan, because youth employment conditions would presumably influence people’s attitudes and decisions toward marriage and family formation. If it is difficult for women with young children to continue to work, women who wish to keep working after having a child may feel hesitant to get married and deliver a child. In addition, given the gender-based allocation of work and family responsibilities, married men with children have to financially sustain their family lives. Due to a decline in the number of jobs with stable contract and higher wages, it is also increasingly difficult for men to make a transition into family formation. Thus, gender inequality discourages both women and men from forming unions. Based on these arguments, this chapter deals with the issue of gender wage and how it depends on the institutional context. This study uses unconditional quantile regression that allows us to capture how the gender pay gap depends on the location of the wage distribution. We also employ the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition model to decompose the wage gap between men and women into the gap due to differences in the distribution of predictors (composition) and the gap due to differences in the returns on predictors (wage structure). This cross-national comparison enables us to characterize the greater gender pay gap in Japan as compared to other Asian countries.
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- 1.
In Chapter “Progress of Low Fertility in Japan and Other Asian Countries: A Theoretical Framework”, details of the Singaporean survey for marriage and family are explained.
- 2.
In Japan, the category of lower tertiary includes the graduates of post-secondary vocational schooling as well as two-year college.
- 3.
Note that the definition of the variable of the presence of young children differs across the four data sets. In the Japanese and Singaporean samples, young children are defined as those aged 6 or younger. Conversely, the Korean and Taiwanese data lack information on the age of respondents’ children, so we use the number of children of the respondents.
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Takenoshita, H. (2020). The Gender Wage Gap in Four Asian Countries: Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. In: Matsuda, S. (eds) Low Fertility in Advanced Asian Economies. SpringerBriefs in Population Studies(). Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0710-6_3
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