The Goodwill Effect? Female Access to the Labor Market Over Transition: A Multicountry Analysis

This study evaluates quantitatively the context of gender discrimination in transition countries in terms of access to the labor market. Over economic transition female labor market participation has generally weakened. Notwithstanding, transition countries differ in institutional design, structural labor supply patterns, labor demand characteristics and the speed of transition processes. We propose to evaluate the contribution of these effects to the observed extent of gender discrimination. Using estimators of gender discrimination obtained from a panel of micro-datasets covering a possibly large set of transition countries, we seek determinants cross-country variation in gender discrimination in the labor market. Empirical evidence suggest that while countries with generally higher female labor force participation are characterized by less discrimination, ceteris paribus, this pattern does not hold for the transition countries.