In this paper we analyze the trend of the gender gap between wives and husbands for Mediterranean countries with a strong family tradition, using data from the European Household Panel (ECHP) of 2001 and the European Survey on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) of 2006. In general, wives and husbands, when married, have the same characteristics but wives suffer from two types of discrimination with respect to husbands: a lower wage for the same work and a primary responsibility for children. This paper uses quantile regression and counterfactual decomposition methods to investigate whether a glass ceiling exists or if instead a sticky floor is more prevalent among European families over time (2001 and 2006). We correct for selectivity the unconditional wage distribution of married women and we show that the wage gap decomposition is different if we ignore self-selection. We find that the wage gap is positive in each country, and the greater part of it is composed of a discrimination effect, while the characteristics effect is small. In Mediterranean countries, wives suffer from the sticky floor effect, i.e. the gender gap is bigger at the bottom of distribution, while we can observe that the glass ceiling effect decreased in most countries in 2006.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.