| China’s economic structure has been changed from command economy to market economy since the reform and opening up. The transform of the economic system brings us rapid economic development, and also causes a serious issue-gender wage gap. Male workers always have a higher salary than female workers under the same circumstance, and female workers have weakness in getting a job, promotion, development in labor market. Many scholars have been doing lots of researches to reveal the causes and reach an agreement that gender discrimination is the main reason to gender wage gap. During thousands of years in China, the feudal thought- “men are superior to women” was in domain position over the long term which has greatly weakened female’ right and this influence has not went away till today.According to the data published by State Statistics Bureau in Jan.2015, active labor force is decreasing continuously in the recent 3 years, and decrease by 3.71 million. The speed of economic growth begins to slow down because the phenomenon of demographic dividend is fading away. At the same time, the issue of aging population is becoming more and more serious. Therefore we need to pay attention to female workers who have positive influence to labor market and give them an affirmative feedback. Also we need to find the reasons causing gender wage gap and eliminate them. In this way, we can make social equity come true and enhance economic growth efficiency.The data in this paper comes from urban part in CHIP project in 2007 launched by Institute of Economics of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and find that there is a serious issue of gender wage gap in urban labor market in China. The gender wage gap is decomposed by Blinder-Oaxaca method. The results show that only 8% can be explained by the difference of personal characteristic and the rest 92% cannot be explained. It proves that the main reason cause gender wage gap is gender discrimination. Among all the other reasons which cause gender wage gap, we find that the gender wage gap in labor market can be lowed to some extent by efficient human capital accumulation. Through accepting more education, female workers can get more salary and lower wage gap between male workers. As an important way to improve knowledge and skills, training has a more positive effect on female workers than male workers. There’s an obvious industry difference between female workers and male workers: more female workers are distributed in first and second industry which have lower wage, while more male workers are distributed in forth industry which has higher wage. And occupational segregation exists in the urban labor market in China. More male workers become management level personnel and technical staff which need higher qualification and can get higher wage, while more female workers become clerks and service staff which need simple qualification and can get lower wage. More male workers and female workers choose state owned enterprise. There exist obvious gender wage gap no matter the enterprise is state owned or non-state owned, and the gap is more serious in non-state owned enterprise than in state owned enterprise.Base on the analysis, here are some suggestions: First, government should strengthen legislative system, make the laws and regulations perfect, reinforce the restraint to corporation, heighten the protection to female workers, guarantee female workers can get the equal opportunity to work, and improve supervision system to achieve equal pay for equal work. Secondly, making sure there’s a correct gender conception and build a good culture atmosphere. And take full advantage of medium to popularize and guide people abandon the concept of gender discrimination. Thirdly, to female workers, they need to improve themselves, maintain a good mentality, have a firm confidence and respond actively. |
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