Gender wage gap and the role of skills and tasks: evidence from the Austrian PIAAC data set

Abstract

We analyze the gender differences in skills, tasks and skill matching of workers, and the impact of these factors on the gender wage gap, using the Survey of Adult Skills, a product of the OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). We show that data on these characteristics, not available in traditional data sets, explain a substantial part of the gender wage gap. Based on up-to-date econometric methodology, the unexplained part of the gender wage gap is reduced by six to nine percentage points across the whole wage distribution when we add skill and occupational task variables and control for sample selection. We show that this result stems from gender differences in returns on tasks and skills, and gender differences in skill endowments and occupational tasks.

Es la versión preprint del artículo. Se puede consultar la versión final en https://doi.org/10.1080/00036846.2019.1630707