Gender Wage Differential in Public and Private Sectors in India
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Gender Wage Differential in Public and Private Sectors in India Shiney Chakraborty1
© Indian Society of Labour Economics 2020
Abstract This paper provides an analysis of gender wage differential in the overall labour market, public–private sectors in India by applying different decomposition techniques, using the National Sample Survey, 50th, 68th rounds of Employment and Unemployment surveys along with the recently released Periodic Labour Force Survey (2018–2019). The results show that the unexplained component explained the major part of the gap and occupational discrimination was considerably more important than wage discrimination. The increase in gender wage gap in the public sector is because of the implementation of various public employment schemes for nutrition, health and education and the increasing reliance on underpaid women workers in implementing the same. It had the perverse effect of intensifying gender discrimination in terms of occupational segmentation and gender wage gaps. Finally, the study recommends that public policy can play a major positive role in rectifying this distressing situation and a strong political will is required to do so. Keywords Wage differential · Wage discrimination · Job discrimination · Public– private sector JEL Classification J16 · J31 · J45 · J71
I am grateful to Prof. Jayati Ghosh without whom whatever arguments I have tried to put forward, would not have been possible. The paper is already presented in the 60th Annual Conference of the Indian Society of Labour Economics at IGIDR Mumbai (19th–21st December, 2018) and this is part of my PhD thesis submitted at Jawaharlal Nehru University (2018). * Shiney Chakraborty [email protected] 1
Researcher, Institute of Social Studies Trust, New Delhi 110003, India
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Vol.:(0123456789) ISLE
The Indian Journal of Labour Economics
1 Introduction There is now extensive economic research showing how gender inequality not only hampers pro-poor growth but also hinders both short-term and long-term economic growth (Birdsall and Londono 1997; Deininger and Olinto 2000). In India, the ubiquitous presence of stark gender-based inequalities is observed in various spheres such as issuing of land rights by the state (Agarwal 2002), education (Kingdon and Unni 2001), intra-household allocation of food and resources (Sen and Dreze 1989) and payment of wages and remuneration (Unni 1999). Gender disparity in wages is well established in all countries irrespective of their levels of development (Blau and Kahn 2003; World Bank 2012), and in an emerging economy like India the gap in wages is even higher (Bhaumik and Chakrabarty 2008; Das 2006; Kingdon and Unni 2001). Apart from the persistent gender wage gap, Indian economy is characterised by several other striking features like low and declining women’s workforce participation rate1 (hereafter WPR) in the period of high-income growth and wide divergence in women’s WPR across rural and urban areas. However, the key contribution of this paper is to investigate the ma
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