Equal Work, Unequal Pay: Gender Wage Discrimination in India

Abstract

This paper investigates gender wage discrimination in India using data from the nationally representative Indian Human Development Survey round I (IHDS 2005) as well as round II (IHDS 2011). We examine the gender wage gap in the country across rural and urban areas separately as well as at an aggregate level. Controlling for financial and household characteristics, we employ a modified Mincer regression for men and women. We then breakdown the wage differential into explainable and unexplainable components using the Blinder–Oaxaca methodology. We find that education and experience significantly influence wages across genders in both rural and urban areas, while their affect is more prominent in urban areas. Through the decomposition analysis, we find that although the log wage differential decreased between 2005 and 2011, this reduction is overshadowed by a larger portion of the differential being attributed to different treatment of the same skills, indicative of potential discrimination.