IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ekd/008007/8345.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Is there a Glass Ceiling or Sticky Floor in India? Examining the Wage Gap across the Wage Distribution

Author

Listed:
  • Smrutirekha Singhari
  • S.Madheswaran

Abstract

The motivation of the study is to answer the following questions: Is there any significant wage gap across gender, caste and religious groups in regular and casual labour market in India? Does ‘Glass Ceiling’ or ‘Sticky Floor’ exist in labour market? Why such phenomenon occurs? The Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition method and Machado Mata Melly decomposition method The findings show a declining trend of gender wage gap from 2004-05 to 2011-12. The decline in endowment difference has largely contributed to decline in raw wage differentials. The gender discrimination is widening over the years, because the percentage contribution of coefficients to the raw wage difference is showing an increasing trend. We observe evidence of ‘sticky floor’ in both regular and casual labour market in India. The evidence of sticky floor implies that women at the lower end of the overall wage distribution experience larger wage gaps compared to women at the upper end. The wage gap between Scheduled Caste and Non Scheduled Caste casual workers is increasing throughout the wage distribution and it is more at the upper tail. The workers from lower caste groups experience ‘glass ceiling’ in casual labour market. It is due to occupational segregation in labour market. The Scheduled Caste workers are still confined to traditional caste occupations or occupations with low returns. The policy should be in favor of breaking this hierarchy of occupation in labour market. As far as caste based discrimination is concerned, we found that the percentage contribution of characteristics (endowment) to raw wage difference has increased over the years, except in casual worker’s lower wage distribution. It is important to note that the large endowment difference implies prevalence of pre-market discriminatory practices in India. The average earnings of Muslims are comparatively lower than that of NonMuslims in regular labour market. Out of total raw wage gap between Muslim and NonMuslim wage gap in regular labour market, almost 70 percent is on account of endowment difference. There is a need for continued government policies aimed at education and skill building for the Scheduled Castes and Muslim people.

Suggested Citation

  • Smrutirekha Singhari & S.Madheswaran, 2015. "Is there a Glass Ceiling or Sticky Floor in India? Examining the Wage Gap across the Wage Distribution," EcoMod2015 8345, EcoMod.
    • Handle: RePEc:ekd:008007:8345
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://ecomod.net/system/files/ECOMOD_2015_SMRUTIREKHA%20SINGHARI.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Wiji Arulampalam & Alison L. Booth & Mark L. Bryan, 2007. "Is There a Glass Ceiling over Europe? Exploring the Gender Pay Gap across the Wage Distribution," ILR Review, Cornell University, ILR School, vol. 60(2), pages 163-186, January.
    2. Jean-Michel Etienne & Mathieu Narcy, 2010. "Gender Wage Differentials in the French Nonprofit and For-Profit Sectors: Evidence from Quantile Regression," Annals of Economics and Statistics, GENES, issue 99-100, pages 67-90.
    3. de la Rica, Sara & Dolado, Juan J. & Llorens, Vanesa, 2005. "Ceiling and Floors: Gender Wage Gaps by Education in Spain," IZA Discussion Papers 1483, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    4. James Albrecht & Anders Bjorklund & Susan Vroman, 2003. "Is There a Glass Ceiling in Sweden?," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 21(1), pages 145-177, January.
    5. Mehtabul Azam & Nishith Prakash, 2015. "A Distributional Analysis of Public–Private Wage Differential in India," LABOUR, CEIS, vol. 29(4), pages 394-414, December.
    6. repec:adr:anecst:y:2010:i:99-100:p:04 is not listed on IDEAS
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Alison L. Booth, 2006. "The Glass Ceiling in Europe: Why Are Women Doing Badly in the Labour Market?," CEPR Discussion Papers 542, Centre for Economic Policy Research, Research School of Economics, Australian National University.
    2. Jellal, Mohamed & Nordman, Christophe, 2009. "A Theory of Gender Wage Gap," MPRA Paper 17409, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    3. Claudia Olivetti & Barbara Petrongolo, 2008. "Unequal Pay or Unequal Employment? A Cross-Country Analysis of Gender Gaps," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 26(4), pages 621-654, October.
    4. Deshpande, Ashwini & Goel, Deepti & Khanna, Shantanu, 2018. "Bad Karma or Discrimination? Male–Female Wage Gaps Among Salaried Workers in India," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 102(C), pages 331-344.
    5. Mohamed Jellal & Christophe Nordman & Francois-Charles Wolff, 2008. "Evidence on the glass ceiling effect in France using matched worker-firm data," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 40(24), pages 3233-3250.
    6. repec:dau:papers:123456789/4377 is not listed on IDEAS
    7. Tindara Addabbo & Donata Favaro & Stefano Magrini, 2012. "Gender differences in productivity rewards: the role of human capital," International Review of Economics, Springer;Happiness Economics and Interpersonal Relations (HEIRS), vol. 59(1), pages 81-110, March.
    8. José-Ignacio Antón & Rafael Muñoz de Bustillo & Miguel Carrera, 2012. "Raining stones? Female immigrants in the Spanish labour market," Estudios de Economia, University of Chile, Department of Economics, vol. 39(1 Year 20), pages 53-86, June.
    9. Ganguli, Ina & Terrell, Katherine, 2005. "Wage Ceilings and Floors: The Gender Gap in Ukraine's Transition," IZA Discussion Papers 1776, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    10. Theodossiou, I. & Zangelidis, A., 2009. "Should I stay or should I go? The effect of gender, education and unemployment on labour market transitions," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 16(5), pages 566-577, October.
    11. Chi, Wei & Li, Bo, 2008. "Glass ceiling or sticky floor? Examining the gender earnings differential across the earnings distribution in urban China, 1987-2004," Journal of Comparative Economics, Elsevier, vol. 36(2), pages 243-263, June.
    12. Coral Río & Carlos Gradín & Olga Cantó, 2011. "The measurement of gender wage discrimination: the distributional approach revisited," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 9(1), pages 57-86, March.
    13. repec:dau:papers:123456789/4344 is not listed on IDEAS
    14. Pham, T. Hung & Reilly, Barry, 2007. "Ethnic Wage Inequality in Vietnam: Empirical Evidence from 2002," MPRA Paper 6477, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    15. Landmesser Joanna Małgorzata, 2018. "The Use of Hazard Models for the Analysis of Income Inequalities in Poland," Folia Oeconomica Stetinensia, Sciendo, vol. 18(1), pages 144-156, June.
    16. Danijel Nestic, 2010. "The Gender Wage Gap in Croatia – Estimating the Impact of Differing Rewards by Means of Counterfactual Distributions," Croatian Economic Survey, The Institute of Economics, Zagreb, vol. 12(1), pages 83-119, April.
    17. Mohamed Jellal & Christophe Jalil Nordman & Francois-Charles Wolff, 2008. "Evidence on the glass ceiling effect in France using matched worker-firm data," Post-Print hal-00582039, HAL.
    18. Yekaterina Chzhen & Karen Mumford, "undated". "Gender Gaps Across the Earnings Distribution in Britain: Are Women Bossy Enough?," Discussion Papers 09/27, Department of Economics, University of York.
    19. Tindara ADDABBO & Donata Favaro, 2007. "Education and wage differentials by gender in Italy," CHILD Working Papers wp04_07, CHILD - Centre for Household, Income, Labour and Demographic economics - ITALY.
    20. Klumpp, Tilman & Su, Xuejuan, 2013. "Second-order statistical discrimination," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 97(C), pages 108-116.
    21. Thomas Buser & Muriel Niederle & Hessel Oosterbeek, 2014. "Gender, Competitiveness, and Career Choices," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 129(3), pages 1409-1447.
    22. Thomas Dohmen & Hartmut Lehmann & Anzelika Zaiceva, 2008. "The Gender Earnings Gap inside a Russian Firm: First Evidence from Personnel Data - 1997 to 2002 ; Updated Version," ESCIRRU Working Papers 6, DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    India; Labor market issues; Developing countries;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ekd:008007:8345. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Theresa Leary (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ecomoea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.