Gender salary gap in the labor market in Cameroon: glass ceiling or sticky floor?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18559/rielf.2024.1.1640Keywords:
wage gap, gender, glass ceiling, sticky floor, discriminationAbstract
Purpose: This article aims to verify whether the sources of salary inequalities between women and men on the labor market in Cameroon result from the existence of a glass ceiling and/or a sticky floor.
Design/methodology/approach: The method chosen is that of quantile regressions supplemented by the quantile decomposition technique.
Findings: The results obtained support the existence of a sticky floor and reject that of a glass ceiling. They show that male/female wage inequalities decrease as we move up the wage distribution. At the top of the distribution, the wage gap to the detriment of women mainly finds its source in differences in observable individual characteristics, while at the bottom of the distribution, this gap is more due to factors exogenous to these observable characteristics.
Originality/value – Our paper highlights the fact that, in the labor market in Cameroon, the level of discrimination against women is a decreasing function of salary quintiles. Which is both an original result and at first glance paradoxical insofar as one would have expected that possible discrimination would be more significant at the level of the best paid jobs. Thus, women in Cameroon should aim to compete for highly paid jobs as there, they are less exposed to the risk of discrimination.
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