Analyzing The Gender Wage Gap Based On Household Survey Data

Over the past thirty years of economic reform and opening-up, China has made tremendous achievements in its every aspects including economic development. However, along with deepening economic reform, in particular, as a result of economic transition, the structure of the labor market in China has significantly changed. The doctrine of absolute equalitarianism has been replaced by market-oriented values.Such changes have produced complicated impacts on the gender wage gap.Through analyzing the gender wage gap from economic, systemic and tradition cultural view, based on micro-database of CHNS, this paper analyses preliminarily the gender wage,e.g. descriptive analysis for wage gap and regression analysis, and uses Oaxaca-Blinder method to further analyze empirically the gender wage gap caused by the discrimination against females in the labor market. The results reveal that, both individual differences in their endowments and labor market discrimination contributed to the gender wage gap. The empirical results also demonstrate that over time, on the one hand, the contribution of individual differences in their endowments to the gender wage gap has been scaled down; on the other hand, the extent to which labor market discrimination explained for the gender wage gap has been extended. The increasing labor market discrimination has widened the gender wage gap. The paper also argues that the extent of labor market discrimination is related to the level of economic development, leading to the differential levels of the gender wage gap.Thus, the authorities should pay more attention to these problems, including educational investment, improving female education and promoting gender equality in education, and encourage enterprises to increase training for their staff, especially for female employee, by resorting to such measures as reducing tax.At present, the degree of sexual discrimination in developed areas is lower than in underdeveloped areas; therefore, improvement of the gender wage gap can be achieved by accelerating economic development. Also, it shouldn’t be neglected for the governmental authorities to strengthen labor supervision and standardize all systems in labor market.