On gender differences in wages in Switzerland Available to Purchase

In this paper, we devise a new methodology to analyse the gender differences in wage inequality. We first examine some traditional wage decomposition based on the means of wages, and then show how this approach can be extended to the whole distribution by using a simple measure of inequality, that is the variance of the logarithm of wages. We then apply this method to Swiss data for the years 1991 and 1995. It appears that the greatest contribution to gender wage inequality differences in Switzerland is due to differences in the distributions of unobservable characteristics, while human capital tends to compensate slightly for this effect.