【Topic】Glass Ceiling or Sticky Floor? Examining the Gender Pay Gap across the Wage Distribution in Urban China, 1987-2004

【Speaker】Chi Wei, Assistant Professor, Human Resource Development and Management, School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University

【Time】14:00-16:00,2008-12-4, Thursday

【Venue】Room 101, Shunde Building, Tsinghua SEM

【Language】Chinese

【Organizer】Department of Human Resources & Organizational Behavior

【Background Information】

Abstract

Using 1987, 1996, and 2004 data, we show that the gender pay gap in the Chinese urban labor market has increased across the wage distribution, and the increase was greater at the lower quantiles. We interpret this as evidence of the “sticky floor” effect. We use the reweighting and recentered influence function projection method proposed by Firpo, Fortin, Lemieux (2005) to decompose gender pay differentials across the wage distribution. We find that the gender differences in the return to labor market characteristics, also known as the “discrimination effect” or “unexplained gender pay gap”, contribute most to the increase in the overall gender pay gap. The Firpo, Fortin, and Lemieux method allows us to further decompose the gender pay gap into the contribution of each individual variable. We find that the “sticky floor” effect may be associated with a particularly low paid group of female production workers with relatively less education working in non-state owned enterprises."

Bio

Ms Chi is an assistant professor in the Department of Human Resources and Organization Behavior in the School of Economics and Management at Tsinghua Universty. Prior to joining in Tsinghua in fall 2005, Ms Chi worked as a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Economics in Kansas State University from fall 2003 to summer 2005. Ms. Chi was born and brought up in China. She received Bachelor degree in Economics from Renmin University of China in 1998, and pursued further education in the United States. She received PhD in Human Resources and Industrial Relations with minor in Statistics from Carlson School of Management of University of Minnesota in summer 2003. Her research interests concentrate on human resource economics, labor market, and wage and compensation. Her recent research projects include income inequality, gender pay gap, and education economics in China. She has taught MBA, graduate, and undergraduate students courses on fundamentals of management, compensation management, human resource economics, labor economics, intermediate microeconomics, and quantitative methods in human resource management research.