Wages in a Growing Russia: When is a Ten Percent Rise in the Gender Pay Gap Good News?

The robust Russian economic recovery after the 1998 financial crisis raised the economic standing of the population, especially for low-paid workers, most of whom are women. In this paper I use the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey from 1996 through 2002 to ask whether this helped to reduce the gender wage gap. The wage measurement has been affected by the wage arrears, an integral feature of the Russian labor market in this period. The raw malefemale wage gap for those not affected by wage arrears exhibits a stable pattern save a 10 percentage point increase in 2000. However, this temporal widening of the gap is due to lowwage women becoming more likely to receive their wages in full than low-wage men in 2000. Furthermore, the wage gap is stable for those who consistently receive full wages.