The measurement of gender wage discrimination: the distributional approach revisited

This paper presents the advantages of taking into account the distribution of the individual wage gap when analysing female wage discrimination. The limitations of previous approaches such as the classic Oaxaca-Blinder and the recent distributive proposals using quantile regressions or counterfactual functions are thoroughly discussed. The new methodology presented here relies on Jenkins' (1994) work and proposes the use of poverty and deprivation literature techniques that are directly applicable to the measurement of discrimination. As an illustrative example we measure female wage discrimination in Spain aggregating individual wage gaps estimated with OLS and quantile regressions