Gender Wage Gap And The Discrimination Distribution In Chinese Economy Transition

Many previous studies examined the mean gender pay gap in the transitional Chinese econ-omy, but less focused on the decomposition of the entire wage distribution. This paper ex-amines the gender wage gap at different points of wage distribution from1989-2006.With the correction of index number problem to decompose differences in the distribution of wage the empirical methods is unconditional quantile regression model. Compared with available methods suggested by Juhn, Murphy and Pierce (1993), DiNardo, Fortin and Le-mieux (1996) and Machado and Jose Mata (2005), the RIF method has more advantages. Us-ing recentered influence function the gender wage inequality can be divided into the contri-bution of each independent variable directly by allowing the decomposition to any distribu-tional measure, and not only consistent the right functional form is quantile.Using China Health and Nutrition Survey (hereafter CHNS) data from1989to2006, the em-pirical analysis shows two critical results as follows:(1) Before1997market mechanism was the major factor to explain the gender wage gap and then gender wage discrimination has become more important factor to analysis the gender inequality.(2) The trend of gender wage discrimination distribution also shows that middle-income (40th quantile-50th quantile) women suffered the discrimination greater than others during the economic reform rather beyond the mean.Thus we interpret the result is closely related to enforce gender wage equality form govern-ment power in China’s planned economy. With the process of economic reform, the labor market has improved the allocation efficiency of human capital while the government has re-laxed the compulsory protection of gender wage equality. However, the result has taken on a rapid increase of discrimination to median income women.