Download The purpose of the paper was to analyse the gender wage gap in

Regional differences in gender wage gaps in Poland
The purpose of the paper is to analyse the gender wage gap across Polish regions. In the first
step we compare the raw differences between wages of men and women in regional (NUTS2)
labour markets in Poland. In the second step we investigate how much of the raw differences
in wages between men and women can be explained by differences in personal and
employment characteristics of workers and analyse in which regions the unexplained part of
the wage gap is the highest and to what extent it can be attributed to gender discrimination.
The analyses are based on 16 NUTS2 Polish regions in 2006-2010. We use metadata with
individual data on wages and workers’ characteristics constructed from two sources of data:
the Structure of Wages and Salaries by occupations survey (SWS) and the Labour force
survey (LFS) carried out by Polish Central Statistical Office.
The authors restricted the analysis to occupational groups with nearly balanced gender ratio
(masculinisation ratio between 0.4 and 0.6) and, hence, control for potential gender
segregation in the labour market. As far as the methodology is concerned the standard
approach of the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition was used. As the dependent variable we use
the base wage per hour, among the explanatory variables we control both for personal
characteristics of workers (level of education, work experience) and employment
characteristics (size of the firm, ownership sector and the NACE section).
The analyses of raw differences in wages of men and women across regions show that
although on average women in Poland earn only few per cent less than men, the differences
across regions are significant. The highest differences (amounting to several percent) in wages
between men and women are noted in large metropolitan areas. On the contrary, in some of
the less developed eastern regions of Poland the average wages of women are higher than the
ones of men.
The Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition on the whole sample (16 regions) shows that the
endowments effect is negative indicating that differences in workers characteristics are not
able to explain the differences in wages between men and women in Poland and pointing to
existence of high wage discrimination of women. However there are considerable differences
at the regional level. In five regions the endowments effect is positive indicating that part of
the differences in wages are due to different characteristics of men and women. These are
mostly the industrial western regions of Poland with relatively high percentage of workers in
mining and shipbuilding industry. On the other hand the differences in workers’
characteristics were not explaining differences in wages in most of the rural, eastern, less
developed regions of Poland. In these regions the unexplained part of the wage gap is much
higher than the total wage gap pointing to existence of high wage discrimination of women.
The results of the paper confirm previous findings (Słoczyński, 2012) however indicate that
previous estimates of wage discrimination of women in Poland based on whole population
data seems to be overestimated. When we separate the effect of segregation of women into
less-paid occupations the discrimination effect is much smaller.