Exploring Gender Wage Gap in Urban Labor Market of Bangladesh

Abstract

Using the Labor Force Survey 2010 dataset this paper examines gender wage gap in a large sample of urban workers in Bangladesh and explore whether gender wage gap varies across the wage distribution. Mincerian OLS regression and its Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition results reveal that the estimated wage gap between men and women workers is 21.2%. Adjusting women’s endowments levels to those of men increases women’s wage by 12.1% and a gap of 8.0% remains unexplained. The decomposition results based on the unconditional quantile regressions demonstrate that the estimated total gender wage gap is higher at lower end of the wage distribution compared to the higher end.