Gender wage gap and segregation in enterprises and the public sector in late transition countries

Transition countries are in the process of introducing Western-type anti-discrimination policies aimed at reducing the gender wage gap. Each of these policies affects a different part of the gap. In this paper, large matched employer-employee data sets from the Czech Republic and Slovakia are used to provide a detailed decomposition of the gender wage gap. Based on 1998 data from medium and large firms, various forms of employment segregation are related to over one third of the overall pay difference between the genders in both countries. However, outside of the public sectors, almost two thirds of the total gap remains attributable to an individual's gender, which suggests that much of the gap is due to violations of the equal pay policy. (C) 2003 Association for Comparative Economic Studies. Published by Elsevier lnc All rights reserved.