A1306
Title: The gender wage gap over the life cycle: Evidence from Japan
Authors: Jauer Chen - Senshu University (Japan) [presenting]
Abstract: The gender wage gap is a persistent and pervasive issue that has received significant attention from economists, policymakers, and the general public. Despite efforts to close the gap, it remains a challenge to quantify and understand the sources of this disparity. The aim is to shed light on the gender wage gap over the life cycle, using data from Japan's Basic Survey on Wage Structure (BSWS). This data provides rich information on the wages of employees and offers a unique opportunity to examine the pattern of the gender wage gap across different age groups. Our findings show that the gender wage gap widens with age, particularly among those with higher education levels. This growing pattern is consistent with previous research, which found that the gender earnings gap widens over the life cycle and is greater among college graduates than others. Our results also indicate that the gap is larger in the middle of the wage distribution in each age group, except for those over 55. Valuable insights into the life cycle of the gender wage gap in Japan are provided, contributing to a deeper understanding of this issue. Primarily results are preliminarily presented, obtained from the quantile decomposition and the RIF decomposition in the context of unconditional quantile regressions.