The Gender Wage Differentials among Rural-Urban Migrants in China∗

This paper analyzes the gender wage disparities among rural-urban migrants in urban China using a nationally representative data set. On average, female migrants earn only 66% of their male counterparts’ average hourly wage. And the gender wage gap is not uniform across migrants’ wage distribution with differentials much higher at the top end than at the bottom and the middle. The mean decomposition method by Fortin (2008) and the unconditional quantile regression by Firpo et al. (2009) are combined to decompose the distributional gender wage differentials into the contribution of each covariate. We find that the discrimination effect contributes more to the wage gap than the endowment effect throughout the wage distribution. Although the gender wage differential is the largest at the higher end of rural migrants’ wage distribution, our decomposition results show that gender wage discrimination effect attributable to unequal returns to observable characteristics is most serious among low wage earners. How selected labor market characteristics contribute to the discrimination effect across the whole wage distribution is also investigated. JEL classification: J3; J71