Gender Wage Gap in China

Introduction

Unlike the case with various developed countries, such as the US, which is currently experiencing a narrowing of the gender wage gap, China, the world’s second largest economy, is experienced a widening gender pay gap in recent decades. The causes of this gap are diverse and include issues such as rural-urban migration, job selection, education and work experience, human capital endowment and many others.

After 1980, the female rate of employment began to decline in China and the gender wage gap started to widen; this was largely attributable to China’s economic reforms. In 1978, the party began to promote the notion of China’s reform and an opening up, which was a radical departure from the Maoist approach, based on a centrally planned market driving the economy. These actions, on the one hand, contributed to a consequent deregulation of wages, thereby facilitating discrimination in the labour market. On the other hand, however, increased powerful market force due to the market reform could in turn, punish the employer who has the tastes of discrimination and then reduced gap in the long run, as the payoff of the workers tends to base on personal ability of work (Jolliffe and Campos, 2005). In this investigation, I shall focus on the causes of the gender wage gap in China by examine empirical research, and will subsequently analyse how the impact of the China’s economic reforms may have affected the gender wage gap.

Literature Review

Since the 1978’s reform and opening-up of China, a massive scale of development has been achieved throughout the industrial sector, resulting in a high level of economic growth. However, after two decades of reform and opening-up, China has experienced both positive and negative effects. The issue of gender wage gap differentials has drawn considerable attention from scholars globally. On the one hand, during the pre-reform period, the labour force participation rates were...