Gender Wage Gap and Segregation in Late Transition

Transition countries hoping to join the European Union are in the process of introducing western-type anti-discrimination policies aimed at reducing the gender wage gap. The efficacy of these policies depends on the relative size of those elements of the gap they target; therefore, it is important to quantify these parts. In this Paper, large matched employer-employee data sets from the Czech Republic and Slovakia are used to provide such detailed gender wage gap decomposition. The results, based on 1998 data, suggest that various forms of employment segregation are related to over one third of the overall pay difference between genders in both countries. In the non-public sector, however, almost two thirds of the total gap remains attributable to the individual’s sex, suggesting much of the gap is due to violations of the equal pay policy.