Distributional changes in the gender wage gap in the post-apartheid South African labour market
type: CreativeWork
description: Gender inequality in the labour market is real and it matters. This thesis examines gender wage inequality in the post-apartheid South African labour market from 1993 to 2015 and finds that there is a substantial median wage gap of between 35% and 23% since the end of apartheid. This gap is unexplained by differences in human capital characteristics and it is not declining over time. There has however, been a substantial decline in the gender wage gap at the bottom of the wage distribution from 0.47 log points (about 60%) in 1997 to 0.18 log points in 2010 (about 19%). Similarly, the wage gap at the mean narrowed during the period studied, from 0.34 log points (about 40%) in 1993 to 0.15 log points (about 16%) in 2014. An examination of the gender wage gap is important because in the wake of a new democratic government in 1994 and the introduction of anti-discrimination and affirmative action policies, we expect that the gender wage gap should have narrowed over time. Interestingly, at the median where we would expect the legislation to have been binding, the gender wage gap has stagnated. We find however, that minimum wage legislation in low wage industries (agriculture and domestic work), has had some effect of narrowing the wage gap at the bottom of the distribution. This is especially interesting because this type of wage legislation was not specifically targeted at narrowing the gender wage gap. For this analysis we utilize the Post-Apartheid Labour Market Series (PALMS) dataset from 1993-2015. To do this, we need to address several data quality issues involving how household survey data has been constructed over time. One problem we need to address is that measurement has changed over time. In chapter two of this thesis we show how measurement issues affecting data on domestic work in 1994 and 1995 led to mixed results on the gender wage gap with some researchers finding a rise in the wage gap between 1995 and 2006 and others reporting a drop depending on the …
abstract: Gender inequality in the labour market is real and it matters. This thesis examines gender wage inequality in the post-apartheid South African labour market from 1993 to 2015 and finds that there is a substantial median wage gap of between 35% and 23% since the end of apartheid. This gap is unexplained by differences in human capital characteristics and it is not declining over time. There has however, been a substantial decline in the gender wage gap at the bottom of the wage distribution from 0.47 log points (about 60%) in 1997 to 0.18 log points in 2010 (about 19%). Similarly, the wage gap at the mean narrowed during the period studied, from 0.34 log points (about 40%) in 1993 to 0.15 log points (about 16%) in 2014. An examination of the gender wage gap is important because in the wake of a new democratic government in 1994 and the introduction of anti-discrimination and affirmative action policies, we expect that the gender wage gap should have narrowed over time. Interestingly, at the median where we would expect the legislation to have been binding, the gender wage gap has stagnated. We find however, that minimum wage legislation in low wage industries (agriculture and domestic work), has had some effect of narrowing the wage gap at the bottom of the distribution. This is especially interesting because this type of wage legislation was not specifically targeted at narrowing the gender wage gap. For this analysis we utilize the Post-Apartheid Labour Market Series (PALMS) dataset from 1993-2015. To do this, we need to address several data quality issues involving how household survey data has been constructed over time. One problem we need to address is that measurement has changed over time. In chapter two of this thesis we show how measurement issues affecting data on domestic work in 1994 and 1995 led to mixed results on the gender wage gap with some researchers finding a rise in the wage gap between 1995 and 2006 and others reporting a drop depending on the …
author: Mosomi, Jacqueline Nyamokami
date published: 2018
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:22:46Z
provider: University of Cape Town
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: School of Economics

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/11427/30000