Gender pay gap in the Czech Republic: focused on management

Abstract

The existence of a gender pay gap is well known. This paper focuses on the issue of the pay gap in managerial positions. It aims to examine the development of the gender pay gap in managerial positions in the Czech Republic and to identify the unexplained part of the gender pay gap, which could be an indication of gender pay discrimination. To estimate the unexplained part of the gender pay gap data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) was used and the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition was applied. The results show that in the period 2005-2019, the average raw gender pay gap in management was 0.22 and the unexplained part was 0.13, using the Neumark’s variant of the decomposition. Differences in women’s and men’s personal and firm characteristics could explain about one-third of the pay gap. The results also suggest that the situation has not changed much over the period considered and that the unexplained part of the gender pay gap has decreased only slightly between 2005 and 2019. Thus, reducing the gender pay gap remains a major challenge for both economic policy makers and companies in promoting corporate social responsibility policies.