Is the Gender Wage Discrimination Decreasing in Chile? Thirty Years of “robust” Evidence

This paper analyzes how discrimination by gender in Chile evolved over the period 1958-1996. The paper takes advantage of a series of household surveys that cover an unusually long time series for a developing country. This provides a valuable picture of trends in discrimination over a period that exhibited diverse economic conditions and policies. The study is based on the basic model for the decomposition of Oaxaca (1973) and Oaxaca and Ramson (1994). This methodology enables us to split the wage differential by gender in the components associated to discrimination and productivity. In addition we decompose the discrimination effect in two, a positive discrimination in one group and a negative discrimination in the other. In order to test the robustness of our conclusions, we use bootstrapping to estimate the intervals of confidence of the discrimination components. The main conclusion derived from this study is that in spite of females exhibit a higher level of human capital (endowment) than males, they have been consistently discriminated in the Chilean labor market during the last 30 years. In addition, more important than a over payments to males relative to females is the under payment of females The evidence indicates that discrimination is statistically significant, the trend in discrimination is decreasing over time and this trend was reversed during the nineties.