Gender wage differences in the Philippines labour market.

Abstract

This study aims to determine the factors contributing to the gender wage gap in the Philippines, using 2006 Labour Force Survey (LFS) data, by decomposing the gender gap along the entire conditional distribution of wages. We use the newly available STATA module rqdeco, which generalizes the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition to any quantile of the earnings distribution.

As opposed to most other countries, women in the Philippines earn more than men on average, due to their superior endowments of earnings generating characteristics, such as education. However, after applying the coefficients from the male earnings functions to female characteristics, results that a certain extent of discrimination against females does exist (the coefficients component in the decompositions is significantly positive). We also find evidence of a sticky floor as the counterfactual gender wage gap is more prominent at lower quantiles of the wage distribution. Our results are compared to those in Sakellariou (2004) for the Philippines, which used 1999 data.