The Gender Pay Gap in the Transition from Communism: Some Empirical Evidence

This short paper investigates the path through the 1990s of the gender pay gap in a number of former communist countries of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The main findings are that the gender pay gap has not exhibited, in general, an upward tendency over the transitional period to which available data relate. Most of the gender pay gap is ascribed to the ‘unexplained’ component using conventional decompositions and this may partly be attributable to the proxy measure for labour force experience used in this study. Quantile regression analysis indicates that, in all but one country, the ceteris paribus gender pay gap rises as we move up the wage distribution.