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THE EVOLUTION OF GENDER EARNINGS GAPS AND DISCRIMINATION IN URBAN CHINA, 1988–95
Author(s) -
DÉMURGER Sylvie,
FOURNIER Martin,
CHEN Yi
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
the developing economies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.305
H-Index - 30
eISSN - 1746-1049
pISSN - 0012-1533
DOI - 10.1111/j.1746-1049.2007.00031.x
Subject(s) - earnings , liberalization , china , wage , competition (biology) , gender discrimination , government (linguistics) , labour economics , economics , space (punctuation) , demographic economics , business , market economy , political science , ecology , linguistics , philosophy , accounting , law , biology
This paper analyzes the impact of market liberalization on gender earnings differentials and discrimination against women in urban China at the beginning of the 1990s. The observed stability in the overall gender earnings gap between 1988 and 1995 is shown to result from a complex set of evolutions across enterprises, earnings distributions, and time. Our results highlight the interplay of opposing forces, with economic reforms contributing to changes in managers’ behaviors in different dimensions. On the one hand, by bringing more competition, liberalization favored a reduction in discriminating behaviors in both urban collectives and foreign‐invested enterprises; on the other hand, by relaxing institutional rules, it led to a loosening of the government's egalitarian wage‐setting policies, leaving more space for discrimination in state‐owned enterprises.