Furthermore, since China faces rapid population aging comparable to that in developed countries, promoting female labor participation is an important issue for maintaining the work force in the future. The rejection of the null hypothesis implies the presence of genuine empirical evidence. In 2013, education level was the largest single factor affecting (the much larger) wage inequality. : The rise in China’s gender income inequality. More concretely, using the electronic academic literature databases of EconLit and Web of Science as well as the websites of leading academic publishers for English language literatureFootnote 6 and the Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) database, which is the largest academic literature database in China for Chinese language literature, we first searched for relevant studies published from 1990 to June 2020. (2017). Actually, if the true value is assumed to be zero, the ratio of positive to negative estimates is 64:1408; therefore, the null hypothesis that the number of positive estimates equals the number of negative estimates is strongly rejected (z = − 35.0304, p = 0.000). Read this latest news here. Gender, ownership type of the company and region have an impact on wages. 7 summarizes the major findings from the meta-analysis and concludes the paper. In fact, as part of their welfare programs, SOEs strongly supported the continued employment of women with younger children, through means such as successively opening nursery schools and kindergartens. 44(1), 39–45 (2011), Stanley, T.D., Doucouliagos, H.: Meta-Regression Analysis in Economics and Business. J Labour Market Res 54, 17 (2020). To understand the real state of the wage gap between male and female workers in China, we propose four hypotheses testable by meta-analysis to answer the following fundamental questions: (1) How large is the gender wage gap in China during the transition period? In the 1990s, however, most TVEs were privatized. Section 3 describes the procedures used in searching and selecting the literature subject to the meta-analysis and overviews the selected studies. In this figure, the collected estimates show a skewed distribution toward the left side, leading to suspicions there is a publication selection bias in the literature. 27, 506–524 (2015), Article Credit: File photo. 47, 96–115 (2018b), Ma, X.: Economic Transition and Labor Market Reform in China. 5(1), 67–89 (1998a), Meng, X.: Gender occupational segregation and its impact on the gender wage differential among rural-urban migrants: A Chinese case study. 30(6), 741–752 (1998b), Meng, X.: Labor Market Reform in China. SWP 2011/5, School of Accounting, Economics and Finance, Faculty of Business and Law, Deakin University, Melbourne (2011), Fan, H., He, S., Kwan, Y.K. Wyoming has the largest pay gap, with women earning 35% less than men overall. In theory, the spread of a market mechanism could contribute to reducing the gender wage gap because, in a competitive market, companies should determine wage levels based on a worker’s productivity, which may reduce the unreasonable wage discrimination against women. Average monthly salary of women in urban China reached 6,995 yuan ($1,005) in 2019, up 7.7 percent year-on-year. The selected studies fully satisfy this requirement.Footnote 9 That is, 119 of the 199 works report estimates of a gender variable for urban regions, while 18 are limited to estimates for rural regions; similarly, 7 works focus solely on SOEs and 10 on POEs. : Declining bias and gender wage discrimination? When I asked for the pay gap to be corrected the line manager told me 'the BBC doesn't do equal pay', and that in raising the issue I was being 'aggressive'. Stanley and Doucouliagos (2012) proposed examining this possibility by testing the null hypothesis that the coefficient \({\gamma }_{1}\) is equal to zero in Eq. : FDI backward spillovers in China: What a meta-analysis tells us? To this end, in addition to visual examination using a funnel plot, we conduct a funnel-asymmetry test (FAT), a precision-effect test (PET), and a precision-effect estimate with standard error (PEESE), which were proposed by Stanley and Doucouliagos (2012) and have been used widely in previous meta-studies.Footnote 14. Notably, the biggest gender pay gap in the OECD is in South Korea, where the difference between median full-time earnings of men and women as a … Second, while the public-sector variable shows a significant and positive coefficient in five models, the private-sector variable is insignificant in any of the seven models. In China’s traditional culture, women’s social status has always been lower than that of men. (1a) and (2a) using not only the OLS estimator, but also the cluster-robust OLS estimator, the multi-level mixed-effects RML estimator, and the unbalanced panel estimator for a robustness check. Mark. Section 6 tests for publication selection bias. Later, as is well known, China's economic advancement would leap forward, spurred by the adoption of market mechanisms and large-scale opening up to the outside world; at the same time, income inequality grew markedly. According to the National Statistics Bureau of China, China’s Gini coefficient reached a peak of 0.491 in 2008, then fell to 0.462 by 2015, 0.465 in 2016, and 0.467 in 2017 (https://www.ceicdata.com/zh-hans/china/resident-income-distribution/gini-coefficient). 2007; Song et al. Income inequality has been a persistent feature of China’s rapid growth and development since the late 1970s. BBC’s China editor resigns in protest over gender pay gap Rev. In China, from the latter half of the 1980s to the present, the rapid growth of POEs and the promotion of management autonomy in SOEs are likely to increase discrimination against female workers in both corporate sectors. The vertical axis is the kernel density. In other words, the meta-analysis in this paper examines how much lower is the female wage than the male wage in China, ceteris paribus. Oxford Bull. A breakdown of the 199 selected works by publication year shows that two papers (1.0% of the total) were published during the 1990s, 40 (20.1%) during the 2000s, 143 (71.8%) during the 2010s, and 14 (7.0%) in 2020, faithfully reflecting the growth of empirical analysis in Chinese economic studies in the last decade. Gender wage gaps are smaller for more educated women. Accordingly, we can say that the meta-analysis in this paper provides results consistent with all of the hypotheses regarding the gender wage gap in China. ), or (4) the inverse of the standard error (1/SE) as an analytical weight; (5) the multi-level mixed-effects RLM estimator; (6) the cluster-robust random-effects panel GLS estimator, and (7) the cluster-robust fixed-effects panel LSDV (least squares with dummy variable). Funnel plot of patial correlation coefficients (K = 1472). Coronavirus coming into China from outside, Capital of Hebei declared clear of coronavirus, S. Korea confirms 196 new coronavirus cases, total 6,284, Staff punished in hospital phone theft incident, Watch it again: 13th NPC's fourth session holds second plenary meeting, Wang Yi speaks on China's foreign policy and external relations, Watch it again: State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi meets the press, Classic Chinese tales thrive in modern times, Medical insurance ensures people's health, happiness, Washington must heed UN chief's words of caution, Quality decides the future of continuing education, Internet solutions to drive rural vitalization. Pacific Econ. Human Res. In contrast to the narrowing gender wage gap in the United States, 1 China has experienced a widening gender pay gap in recent decades. From the above perspectives, numerous researchers have attempted to investigate wage inequality in China focusing on the gender aspect (Meng 1998b; Gustafsson and Li 2000; Liu et al. A meta-analysis. A resurgence of traditional stereotypes about women’s w… The modern world faces serious inequality issues. 2000; Maurer-Fazio and Hughes 2002; Rozelle et al. J Chin. In all three countries, the wage gap grows with working age. According to the Doucouliagos standard, if the former shows the true effect size, then it could be said that the wage effect of gender in China would be of a medium size through the transition period, while if the latter is assumed as the true effect size, we could consider that the impact of gender on wage levels would be small. These findings are noteworthy if we are to grasp a real picture of the Chinese wage system. This appendix describes the methodology of the testing for publication selection bias that we employed in Sect. Table 4 reports the estimation results. Growth, Distribution and Political Change: Asia and the Wider World, pp. A lack of childcare and eldercare options. Second, the wage effect of gender differs greatly between regions and corporate sectors in the sense that wage discrimination against women is greater in rural regions and POEs than in urban regions and SOEs. (2a) are multiplied by the standard error: When directly estimating Eq. On the other hand, under the new UWA synthesis method, in Column (c) of Table 2, WAAP synthesis values, considered more reliable, are used as reference values for comparison with those generated by the random-effects model. Econ. As per the report, the wage gap between men and women mainly depended on occupation, industry and work experience. Keywords: discrimination, wage gap, decomposition, gender, Chinese labor market Corresponding author: Almas Heshmati Department of Food and Resource Economics College of Life Science and Biotechnology Korea University, East Building Room#217 Anam-dong, Seongbuk-gu Seoul 136-713 Korea E-mail: heshmati@korea.ac.kr . J. Dev. The Heckman results suggest an underestimation of the raw gender pay gap by 12–14% for the years 2005–2009. Under this system, moving from rural regions to urban regions is prohibited, and the migration of labor is strongly restricted. In these databases and websites, we carried out an AND search for article titles using “China” and “wage” as keywords, obtaining 212 English and 163 Chinese papers.Footnote 7 Next, we closely examined the contents of these 375 studies and picked out those that actually examined the gender effect by estimating a wage function. However, as noted above, since 2000, income inequality in China has expanded; the Gini coefficient was higher than 0.40—which is considered to be the warning level for social disorder. By Chen Meiling | China is no exception (Knight and Song 1991; Li et al. List of literature subject to meta-analysis. Statistics recently released by employment-oriented platform Zhipin reveal that on average, women in China earn 84 percent of what their male counterparts make. The gender pay gap or gender wage gap is the average difference between the remuneration for men and women who are working.