Wage discrimination by gender in Mexico: The case of management and professional jobs

Resumen

This is an analysis of labor market discrimination based on gender, which focuses on the top mean income occupations in Mexico: management and professional workers. We estimated the wage differential between male and female workers due to possible gender discrimination, using the sample of skilled professionals and managers from the Mexican National Survey of Occupation and Employment (ENOE) for the third quarter of 2016 and 2022. We used the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition to estimate the income gap between male and female workers. We observed that the unexplained part of the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition, which is usually considered economic discrimination, is mainly driven by experience (age) and to a less extend tertiary education. Another finding is that in this six-year period, the real income gap against female managers increased more than 40% while this increase was about 5% for female professionals. We also observed that other variables such as university education are more significant for female professionals than for female managers.