Gender wage disparities in Egypt: Evidence from ELMPS 2006 and 2012

This paper focuses on estimating wage differentials between males and females in Egypt to understand the determinants of the gender wage gap. The methodology makes use of Oaxaca-Blinder and Neuman-Oaxaca decomposition techniques applied to data from the Egypt Labor Market Panel Surveys of 2006 and 2012 (ELMPS 2006, 2012). The findings of this paper determine the differences in wages that are due to real variations in characteristics between genders, such as education, experience, living in urban or rural areas, marital status and sector of employment, and other differences due to discrimination against women, in addition to unobservable differences. It is estimated that the wage gap between males and females is 25% and 21% in 2006 and 2012, respectively, which is a sign of improvement. Part of this gap can be explained by the fact that, females are less likely to have high-level and high-paying jobs than males but, another part of the gender wage disparities results from unobservable factors, like non-cognitive skills and psychological characteristics. (C) 2018 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.