The Gender Wage Gap in Spain : An analysis of the impact of the financial crisis on the gender wage gap distribution

Equality is part of the European policy and legislation. However there are still evident signs of women being treated unequally in the labour market. The aim of the thesis is to answer the question if women are more vulnerable to economic shocks in terms of wage distribution. The focus will be on women in Spain in the context of the financial crisis of 2008. The thesis examines the evolution of the salary structure in the period 2002-2014 using the microdata of the Structural Earning Survey. The taste-based and the statistical discrimination theory are going to be described in order to explain the causes of gender wage discrimination. The methods applied in this paper are the Mincer method, which explains the human capital theory and the Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions, which separates the gender wage gap into explained and unexplained parts. The results from the study suggest that there is a decrease in the gender wage gap in Spain following the situation before and after the crisis