From equality to polarization: Changes in urban China's gender earnings gap from 1988 to 2016

This paper studies the evolution of urban China's gender earnings gap from 1988 to 2016. We first document that an upward trend in gender inequality started to reverse after 2007 at the median and in the upper part of the earnings distribution but only for workers in the state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Women in the private sector at the top of the earn-ings distribution did not start to catch up with their male counterparts until 2012. The gender earnings gap at the low end of the distribution, meanwhile, was stuck at a high level after the mid-1990s. Polarization emerges both within the earnings distribution and across ownership types. Following Bayer and Charles (2018), we decompose the change in the gender earnings gap across the whole earnings' distribution and find that a change in the wage structure dominantly drives the trend in gender inequality. Gender-specific factors, such as discrimination, play a minor role. (c) 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.