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RESEARCH PRODUCT

A distributional approach for measuring wage discrimination and occupational discrimination separately

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Numerous statistical methodologies regarding the study of discrimination are based on the well-known Blinder-Oaxaca (1973) decomposition. This divides the wage differential between men and women into one part, which can be explained by differences in individual characteristics, and another part, which is interpreted as discrimination. This decomposition ignores any distributional issues in evaluating discrimination, thus permitting, undesirably, compensation between positively and negatively discriminated women. Jenkins (1994) has criticized this aspect, instead preferring a distributional approach. Del Ri­o et al. (2010), using a distributional approach, which hinges on the deprivational aspect of discrimination, adapts the Foster-Greer-Thorbecke (1984) class of poverty indices to the study of discrimination. Studies adopting the distributional approach pay little attention to the issue of the separate measuring of wage discrimination and occupational discrimination. Instead, our Paper uses the Foster-Greer-Thorbecke indices for measuring wage discrimination and occupational discrimination separately. Similar to the technique employed in the Brown-Moon-Zoloth decomposition (1980), we have thus used a multinomial model to estimate the theoretical distribution of women in occupation, in the absence of occupational discrimination.