Gender wage gap in transition in Vietnam

Abstract

The impact of sectoral location on the gender earnings gap is important in the context of Vietnam’s transition into a market-oriented economy. More and more women are seeking employment in the private sector either in response to retrenchment in the public sector or in response to increasing economic opportunities in the private sector. We apply the Appleton et al. (1999) decomposition technique to the Vietnam Living Standards Survey data collected in 1992-93 and 1997-98, to decompose the gender earnings gap into within sector and between-sector differences. It has found that sectoral location has become more important in 1997-98 and that the changes have had an adverse impact on the gender gap. To further examine the results, conventional decomposition methods are used on different sectors. Three main conclusions are drawn. First, the absolute gender earnings gap has risen over time in the private sector. Second, discrimination has increasingly accounted for more of the gender earnings differences in the private sector over time. Third, discrimination accounts for more of the gap in the private sector than in SOEs in 1997-98 than in 1992-93. Show more