Gender Gap in Labor Market Participation in Romania

This article concentrates on the problem of the access of females to labor market in Romania. The raw gap in labor market participation rates over the period 1997-2008 amounts to app. 22%. Demographic characteristics do not seem to explain this gap - the adjusted gap in labor market participation obtained after controlling for age, education, place of living, and presence of young kids in the household is as high as the raw gap. After adding to the explanatory characteristics the existence of previous working experience, part of the gap, amounting to around 7%, becomes explained by differences in endowments. This means that although demographic characteristics do not explain differences in participation of females and males in Romanian labor market, job-related characteristic may do so. However, access to valuable job-related characteristics for females might be also determined by discriminatory behavior, thus it is not clear if they should be controlled for when decomposing gender gaps. In order to decompose gender gaps in labor market participation in Romania we implemented relatively new non-parametric decomposition technique. After covering already 11 years of data, we were not able to identify any improvement when it comes to access of females to labor market in Romania. According to our findings the gender gap in labor market participation in Romania has even increased over the analyzed period.