The differences in the distribution of observable characteristics of men and women have been found to be irrelevant for explaining the gender wage gap for Poland (Mysíková, 2012). Female’s lower wages are thus attributed to women’s lower valuation at the labor market. In this paper I take a novel approach and test the hypothesis whether women themselves value their skills lower than men. If this is a case then women’s lower wages may be a result of self-undervaluation and not necessarily labor market discrimination. To test this hypothesis I analyze the gender gap in the minimum wages that unemployed persons, who are entering the labor market for the first time, declare they would agree to work for. Based on the data from 2010 Polish Labor Force Survey I focus on unemployed individuals who are looking for a first job and are between 25 and 30 years old. I find that on average unemployed women would agree to work for the net monthly wage of 1380PLN, whereas men for app. 1550PLN. With the use of nonparametric decomposition method developed by Nõpo (2008) I further decompose the observed gap of 12.5% and assess whether the gap may be explained by women’s lower human capital attainment. I find that the differences in the level and type of education acquired by men and women are not at all sufficient to explain the difference in the average minimum wages they are willing to work for. Moreover, the explained component of the gap is found to be negative, which means that if men’s characteristics followed the distribution of women’s then the observed gap would actually increase. This means that the gap in wages that cannot be explained by the differences in the educational attainment between men and women occurs even before entering the labor market. Consequently, the high unexplained gender wage gap may stem from women’s lower self-valuation - or alternatively men’s higher self-assessment - and not necessarily women’s labor market discrimination.

1. FULLTEXT: Is it the labor market that undervalues women or women themselves? Evidence from Poland, Zip archive data, at least v2.0 to extract, 0.1MB

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