<b>Gender differences in pay in the Brazilian public sector between 2002 and 2015: extent, trends, and explanations

Abstract

 This paper studies the gender pay gap in the Brazilian public sector between 2002 and 2015. Blinder-Oaxaca methodology is applied to decompose the wage gap in the part explained by measurable characteristics ― such as differences in workers´ productive endowments or in their occupational distribution ― and a residual component, caused by different returns to these characteristics. The decomposition is applied to all PNAD between 2002 and 2015, but it is discussed in more detail for 2015. For this year a non-parametric alternative proposed by Ñopo (2008) is also applied. The Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition shows that the share of the residual component in the wage gap increased from 45.3% in 2002 to 55.5% in 2015. Ñopo technique indicates that about 54% of the wage gap cannot be attributed to differences in the distributions of individuals’ characteristics, but rather to the unexplained fraction, in 2015. Thus, even controlling for observable characteristics of the labor force, there remains a gender wage gap, whose size suffered no reduction during the analysis period. The most important factors in explaining such difference are age and weekly working hours.