No abstract

This article analyses data from the 2007 Indonesia Family Life Survey in order to decompose the gender gap in earnings into explained and unexplained gaps, not only at the mean but also across the entire distribution. Women earned about 30% less than men, in both paid work and self-employment. The explained gap accounts for only about a quarter of the gap in paid work but for about half of the gap in self-employment. When the decomposition is made across the earnings distribution, the total gap decreases with earnings in both paid work and self-employment, and both conditional and unconditional on characteristics. In both employment sectors, the explained gap remains similar across the distribution, and therefore the un explained gap drives the decrease in the total gap. The unconditional decomposition across the distribution provides great insight into the dynamics that are obscured in results derived from decomposition at the mean.

In the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study Kindergarten Cohort, I find that the gender gap is not uniform across the distribution of math skills and that these quantile-specific gaps vary with age. Specifically, girls at the top of the distribution initially fall behind boys but manage to catch up later. At the same time, girls in the lower parts of the distribution lose ground. In fifth grade, a gender gap of 0.2 standard deviation, about 2.5 months of schooling, is observed across the entire distribution. Overall, these patterns indicate the possibility that low performing girls become worse and vice versa. These results demonstrate important dynamics of the gap that are relevant for policy, but that the mean gap fails to show.

Researchers have claimed that the absence of a biological father accelerates the daughter's menarche. This claim was assessed by employing a large and nationally representative sample of Indonesian women. We analyzed 11,138 ever-married women aged 15+ in the Indonesian Family Life Survey 2015. We regressed age at menarche on the interaction of father absence (vs. presence) and mother absence (vs. presence) at age 12 with or without childhood covariates. For robustness checks, we performed a power analysis, re-ran the same specification for various subgroups, and varied the independent variable of interest. All results produced a null relation between father absence and age at menarche. The power analysis suggests that a false negative was unlikely. Our review of the literature indicates that the claim of the relation between father absence and earlier menarche was based on weak statistical foundations. Other studies with higher-quality datasets tended to find no relation, and our results replicated this tendency. Therefore, the influence of father absence does not appear to be universal.