Gender wage gap by university major: an empirical assessment using Spanish data

[EN] Purpose ¿ This paper aims to analyse gender wage gaps by university majors along the entire wage distribution in Spain before and after the 2008 financial crisis. Design/methodology/approach ¿ The authors perform unconditional quantile regressions to estimate the gender wage gap and use the Oax...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Callado-Muñoz, Francisco, Utrero-González, Natalia|||0000-0001-9304-3517
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2025
País:España
Institución:Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV)
Repositorio:RiuNet. Repositorio Institucional de la Universitat Politécnica de Valéncia
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:riunet.upv.es:10251/220767
Acceso en línea:https://riunet.upv.es/handle/10251/220767
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Gender gap
Education
University major
Earnings distribution
Descripción
Sumario:[EN] Purpose ¿ This paper aims to analyse gender wage gaps by university majors along the entire wage distribution in Spain before and after the 2008 financial crisis. Design/methodology/approach ¿ The authors perform unconditional quantile regressions to estimate the gender wage gap and use the Oaxaca¿Blinder approach to decompose the gender gap. Findings ¿ The observed gender gap among graduates hides significant differences across various fields of study, and both the gap and its unexplained part are highly dependent on the position in the distribution. Engineering and Experimental sciences are the fields with the highest wage differences, and the gap size worsens with the crisis. Health and Humanities, the majors with the highest women presence, show a higher proportion of unexplained part at the bottom tail of the wage distribution, especially after the crisis, suggesting that discrimination against low-paid women has aggravated in these majors. Originality/value ¿ The paper adds to the existing knowledge by analysing the role that educational decisions play in shaping the wage gap, the variability of the gap along the wage distribution and its response to a change in macroeconomic conditions