Gender Earnings Disparity and Discrimination in Urban China: Unconditional Quantile Regression

Market-oriented economic reform has gone through several key stages to bring substantial changes to the current Chinese economy. It accelerated after 1992, and ushered in the pattern transformation since ‘scientific development outlook’ raised in 2002. During this dramatic and complicated economic transitional process, issues regarding income distribution caught people's attention including: How does the earnings distribution change between genders from an early market economy to a post market economy? How do education, work experience, marriage and other factors affect gender earnings and what is the difference among an internal group of women? In this paper, we use data from the Chinese Household Income Projects (2002 and 2007) to analyse the earnings disparity between genders and a female inner group. The unconditional quantile regression finds that the negative effects on earnings of marriage and taking care of children has significantly decreased since 2002, especially for women. But the high return rate to education of female workers is not as significant as before, and the return rate to work experience is falling even faster. Along with the increasing gender earnings gap, the unexplained gap (gender discrimination) has also increased over time and is particularly pronounced in the female higher earnings group.