The Blue Divide: Gender Wage Gaps across Blue Ecological Sectors in Brazil

The blue economy, understood as the sustainable use of ocean resources for economic growth, is increasingly central to coastal development policies. However, its gendered labor outcomes remain poorly understood. This paper examines how wages in oceanrelated formal activities are distributed between women and men across sectors and along the earnings distribution in Brazil’s coastal labor markets. Using linked employer-employee data from the Annual Social Information Report (RAIS) (2006–2023) covering 279 seafront municipalities, we classify formal jobs into five ocean-related sectors and benchmark them against non-ocean activities in the exact locations. We then apply Oaxaca–Blinder and Recentered Influence Function (RIF) decompositions to separate the part of the gender wage gap explained by observable characteristics from the unexplained component. Women earn approximately 4.3% less than men in formal ocean-related jobs, despite having more favorable characteristics, as higher levels of education. The explained component is harmful, indicating that women’s profiles would predict higher wages; the observed gap is therefore entirely sustained by a significant positive unexplained component, consistent with discrimination and unobserved gender-correlated factors. The sector-specific analyses show that unexplained gaps are huge in marine energy and marine transport. Using the RIF decompositions, we find that wage gaps are small at the bottom but widen sharply at the upper quantiles, indicating the presence of glass-ceiling mechanisms rather than sticky floors. These findings show that blue economy development is not distributionally neutral and highlight the need to integrate gender equity explicitly into ocean governance and sustainability agendas.