Gender wage gap by university major: an empirical assessment using Spanish data

Abstract

Purpose This paper aims to analyse gender wage gaps by university majors along the entire wage distribution in Spain before and after the 2008 financial crisis. Design/methodology/approach The authors perform unconditional quantile regressions to estimate the gender wage gap and use the Oaxaca–Blinder approach to decompose the gender gap. Findings The observed gender gap among graduates hides significant differences across various fields of study, and both the gap and its unexplained part are highly dependent on the position in the distribution. Engineering and Experimental sciences are the fields with the highest wage differences, and the gap size worsens with the crisis. Health and Humanities, the majors with the highest women presence, show a higher proportion of unexplained part at the bottom tail of the wage distribution, especially after the crisis, suggesting that discrimination against low-paid women has aggravated in these majors. Originality/value The paper adds to the existing knowledge by analysing the role that educational decisions play in shaping the wage gap, the variability of the gap along the wage distribution and its response to a change in macroeconomic conditions.