Evolución y análisis de la discriminación salarial por género en Chile

Discrimination in the labor market is an important issue in most countries of the world. In such a context, this paper uses nationally representative data from the 1990-2017 National Socio-Economic Characterization Survey to explore the gender wage gap and discrimination in Chile. Different versions of the well-known decomposition of Blinder and Oaxaca are applied to measure the wage gap and to decompose its possible causes and the variables involved. Finally, wage estimates are corrected for selection bias, and decomposition by income quantum is studied. The results of the different methodologies show a decrease in wage discrimination when we look at the full 1990-2017 period, but the decrease was mainly in the 1990-2003 period, and then has remained relatively constant until 2017. Wage discrimination reached 49.7% in 2017, where 45.2% corresponded to women’s sub-payments and 4.5% to men’s overpayments, a structure that is maintained throughout the period studied. On the other hand, it shows that estimating uncorrected wage discrimination due to selection bias underestimates the wage discrimination suffered by women in Chile. Finally, it proves that a large part of wage discrimina¬tion occurs mainly in the extremes of lower and higher income distribution. This work also adds evidence to the fact that women who are active in the labor market have more years of education than men, but for reasons that classical theory cannot explain, they obtain a lower wage.