Analysis of the Gender Gap in the Visegrád Group Countries Based on Luxembourg Income Study

Gender equality is one of the fundamental values of the European Union (EU). Great efforts have been made to defend this right and to promote gender equality within the member states and across the world. However, substantial income differences between men and women are still observed. There is a debated research issue regarding the methodology of measuring gender gap – the traditional methods based on comparing means and medians seem unsatisfactory as they do not consider the shape of income distributions. In the paper we propose a parametric approach for estimating the relative distribution, which enables comparing and visualizing the “gap” between the gender groups at each distribution quantile. Such an approach moves beyond the typical focus on average or median earnings differences, toward a full comparison of the entire distribution of women’s earnings relative to men’s. The focus of the present paper is on income distributions across four Central European countries: Poland, Slovakia, Czechia and Hungary, the members of the Visegrád Group (V4). These countries share a similar history and similar economic development, but there are substantial differences between the national approaches to economic reforms, including labour market policy. This, in turn, is reflected in different income distributions and income inequality patterns. The basis for the calculations was the microdata coming from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS). The statistical methods applied in the study turned out to be relevant to describe the gender gap over the entire income range. The results of the empirical analysis helped to reveal similarities and substantial differences between the countries.