Persistence of the gender pay differential in a transition economy

The primary objective of this paper is to assess the relative economic welfare of women during the transition process. In order to answer this question we provide a detailed account of the male-female wage differential and its dynamics in Poland over the period 1993-1997. We investigate which factors influence this wage gap and the extent to which this gap may be attributed to differences in observable characteristics and to differences in returns to the same characteristics. Regardless of the methodology used or the specification estimated we find that (i) there is almost no change in the extent of the gender wage gap at the mean or at different percentiles of the earnings distribution, (ii) most of the explained portion of the wage gap may be attributed to industrial and occupational segregation, and (iii) a substantial portion of the wage gap remains unexplained. In the final section of the paper we examine the underlying factors that may drive the results