Ceiling and Floors: Gender Wage Gaps by Education in Spain

By V. Llorens, Sara De la Rica Goiricelaya, Juan José Dolado Llobregad. Social Science Research Network, 2005

353 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper analyses the gender wage gaps by education throughout the wage distribution in Spain using individual data from the ECHP (1999). Quantile regressions are used to estimate the wage returns to the different characteristics at the more relevant percentiles and a suitable version of the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition is then implemented to estimate the component of the gender gap not explained by different characteristics. Our main findings are twofold. First, in contrast with the steep pattern found for other countries, the flatter evolution of the gap found in Spain hides a composition effect when the sample is split by education. On the one hand, for the group with college/tertiary education, we find a higher unexplained gap at the top than at the bottom of the distribution, in accordance with the conventional glass ceiling hypothesis. On the other, for the group with lower education, the gap is much higher at the bottom than at the top of the distribution. We label this novel pattern as glass floors and argue that it is due to statistical discrimination exerted by employers in view of the low participation rate of women in this group. Such a hypothesis is confirmed when using the panel structure of the ECHP.

Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9a74fc620dd5c66f594144a82c7832adb93516a5

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Citations in the corpus

Counterfactual distributions with sample selection adjustments: Econometric theory and an application to the Netherlands (2007, background): “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.”
Gender wage gaps, ‘sticky floors’ and ‘glass ceilings’ in Europe ☆ (2013, background): “…studies have addressed some of these issues for some European countries (see, inter alia, Albrecht et al (2003), Arulampalam et al (2007), de la Rica et al (2008), Olivetti and Petrongolo (2008), Albrecht et al (2009), and Nicodemo (2009)), this paper focuses on the mean and median unexplained…”
Spain is Different: Falling Trends of Inequality (2009, background): “De la Rica, Dolado, and Llorens (2008) exclude individuals with tertiary education, self-employed workers and those working less than 15 hours.”
The gap between male and female pay in the Spanish tourism industry (2009, background): “Recent studies in this area for the whole Spanish economy include Amuedo & De la Rica (2006), Caparros et al. (2004), De la Rica et al. (2008), De la Rica & Ugidos (1995), Dolado et al. (2004), García et al. (2001), Gardeazábal & Ugidos (2005) and Hernández (1995, 1996). remuneration (Richter,…”