Publication: Gender Gap in Earnings in Vietnam: Why Do Vietnamese Women Work in Lower Paid Occupations?
Loading...
Date
2018-05
ISSN
Published
2018-05
Editor(s)
Abstract
Differences in earnings between male and female workers persist in developed and developing countries despite a narrowing of gender gaps in educational attainment over the past half-century. This paper examines the gender wage gap in Vietnam and shows that a nontrivial part of the gap is associated with occupational sorting. The paper considers three explanations for why occupational sorting emerges. First, it explores whether women sort into occupations with better nonmonetary characteristics, such as paid leave and shorter hours. The data from Labor Force Surveys support this hypothesis. Second, it checks if occupational sorting among the adult labor force is driven by social norms about gender roles learned and internalized at an early age. To do so, the paper checks for evidence of sorting in the aspirations of 12-year-old children. Specifically, the analysis simulates what the gender wage gap would be if boys and girls pursued the occupations they aspired to at age 12, and the distribution of salaries remained unchanged. The paper does not find support for the hypothesis that gender norms drive occupational sorting by inducing aspirational sorting at an early age. Finally, for individuals with higher education, the paper checks if occupational sorting occurs during the school-to-work transition, when women face higher barriers in finding a job in their field of study. The analysis does not find evidence to support this last hypothesis. Overall, the findings suggest that in Vietnam gender-specific preferences for nonmonetary job characteristics play a key role in the emergence of occupational sorting.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Chowdhury, Iffat; Johnson, Hillary C.; Mannava, Aneesh; Perova, Elizaveta. 2018. Gender Gap in Earnings in Vietnam: Why Do Vietnamese Women Work in Lower Paid Occupations?. Policy Research Working Paper;No. 8433. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/29839 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Publication Geopolitics and the World Trading System(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-12-23)Until the beginning of this century, the GATT/WTO system worked. Economic research provided a compelling explanation. It showed that if governments maximize the well-being of their own countries broadly defined, GATT/WTO principles would facilitate mutually beneficial cooperation over their trade policy choices. Now heightened geopolitical rivalry seems to have undermined the WTO. A simple transposition of the previous rationalization suggests that geopolitics and trade cooperation are not compatible. The paper shows that this is only true if rivalry eclipses any consideration of own-country well-being. In all other circumstances, there are gains from trade cooperation even with geopolitics. Furthermore, the WTO’s relevance is in question only if it adheres too rigidly to its existing rules and norms. Through measured adaptation to the geopolitical imperative, the WTO can continue to thrive as a forum for multilateral trade cooperation in the age of geopolitics.Publication The Macroeconomic Implications of Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Options(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-29)Estimating the macroeconomic implications of climate change impacts and adaptation options is a topic of intense research. This paper presents a framework in the World Bank's macrostructural model to assess climate-related damages. This approach has been used in many Country Climate and Development Reports, a World Bank diagnostic that identifies priorities to ensure continued development in spite of climate change and climate policy objectives. The methodology captures a set of impact channels through which climate change affects the economy by (1) connecting a set of biophysical models to the macroeconomic model and (2) exploring a set of development and climate scenarios. The paper summarizes the results for five countries, highlighting the sources and magnitudes of their vulnerability --- with estimated gross domestic product losses in 2050 exceeding 10 percent of gross domestic product in some countries and scenarios, although only a small set of impact channels is included. The paper also presents estimates of the macroeconomic gains from sector-level adaptation interventions, considering their upfront costs and avoided climate impacts and finding significant net gross domestic product gains from adaptation opportunities identified in the Country Climate and Development Reports. Finally, the paper discusses the limits of current modeling approaches, and their complementarity with empirical approaches based on historical data series. The integrated modeling approach proposed in this paper can inform policymakers as they make proactive decisions on climate change adaptation and resilience.Publication Global Poverty Revisited Using 2021 PPPs and New Data on Consumption(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-06-05)Recent improvements in survey methodologies have increased measured consumption in many low- and lower-middle-income countries that now collect a more comprehensive measure of household consumption. Faced with such methodological changes, countries have frequently revised upward their national poverty lines to make them appropriate for the new measures of consumption. This in turn affects the World Bank’s global poverty lines when they are periodically revised. The international poverty line, which is based on the typical poverty line in low-income countries, increases by around 40 percent to $3.00 when the more recent national poverty lines as well as the 2021 purchasing power parities are incorporated. The net impact of the changes in international prices, the poverty line, and new survey data (including new data for India) is an increase in global extreme poverty by some 125 million people in 2022, and a significant shift of poverty away from South Asia and toward Sub-Saharan Africa. The changes at higher poverty lines, which are more relevant to middle-income countries, are mixed.Publication Global Socio-economic Resilience to Natural Disasters(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-22)Most disaster risk assessments use damages to physical assets as their central metric, often neglecting distributional impacts and the coping and recovery capacity of affected people. To address this shortcoming, the concepts of well-being losses and socio-economic resilience—the ability to experience asset losses without a decline in well-being—have been proposed. This paper uses microsimulations to produce a global estimate of well-being losses from, and socio-economic resilience to, natural disasters, covering 132 countries. On average, each $1 in disaster-related asset losses results in well-being losses equivalent to a $2 uniform national drop in consumption, with significant variation within and across countries. The poorest income quintile within each country incurs only 9% of national asset losses but accounts for 33% of well-being losses. Compared to high-income countries, low-income countries experience 67% greater well-being losses per dollar of asset losses and require 56% more time to recover. Socio-economic resilience is uncorrelated with exposure or vulnerability to natural hazards. However, a 10 percent increase in GDP per capita is associated with a 0.9 percentage point gain in resilience, but this benefit arises indirectly—such as through higher rate of formal employment, better financial inclusion, and broader social protection coverage—rather than from higher income itself. This paper assess ten policy options and finds that socio-economic and financial interventions (such as insurance and social protection) can effectively complement asset-focused measures (e.g., construction standards) and that interventions targeting low-income populations usually have higher returns in terms of avoided well-being losses per dollar invested.Publication From Patriarchy to Policy(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-29)Legal institutions play an important role in shaping gender equality in economic domains, from inheritance to labor markets. But where do gender equal laws come from? Using cross-country data on social norms and legal equality, this paper investigates the socio-cultural roots of gender inequity in the legal system and its implications for female labor force participation. To identify the impact of social norms, the analysis uses an empirical strategy that exploits pre-modern differences in ancestral patriarchal culture as an instrument for present-day gender norms. The findings show that ancestral patriarchal culture is a strong predictor of contemporary norms, and conservative social norms are associated with more gender inequality in the de jure legal framework, the de facto implementation of laws, and the labor market. The paper presents evidence for a political selection mechanism linking norms to laws: countries with more conservative norms elect political leaders who are more hostile to gender equality, who then pass less progressive legislation. The results highlight the cultural roots and political drivers of legalized gender inequality.
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Gender Gap in Earnings in Vietnam(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-03)Vietnam has achieved important progress in closing the gender gap in education and increasing women’s labor force participation. However, are women’s labor market opportunities on par with those of men? We analyze the gender earnings gap and establish that women’s propensity to work in lower paid occupations is a major culprit in the emergence of a gender earnings gap. We provide suggestive evidence of why women choose to work in lower paid occupations.Publication Gender Streaming in Vietnam(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-01)We examine the gender wage gap in Vietnam and show that a non-trivial part of the gap is associated with occupational sorting. We consider three explanations for why occupational sorting emerges. First, we explore whether occupational sorting is driven by gender differences in preferences for non-monetary characteristics of the jobs. First, we explore whether occupational sorting is driven by gender differences in preferences for non-monetary characteristics of jobs and find that there are indeed differences between the genders in preferences for having a formal contract, insurance, paid leave and shorter hours, which may induce women to forego monetary compensation for these characteristics. Second, we check if occupational sorting among the adult labor force is driven by social norms about gender roles learned and internalized at an early age. To do so we check for evidence of sorting in the aspirations of 12-year-old children by simulating what the gender wage gap would be if boys and girls pursued the occupations they aspire to at 12. And third, for women with higher education, we check if occupational sorting occurs during the school to work transition - if women are less likely to find jobs within their field of study upon graduation. We do not find support for either the second or third hypotheses. Overall, our findings suggest that in Vietnam gender specific preferences for non-monetary job characteristics play a key role in emergence of occupational sorting.Publication Public Work Programs and Gender-Based Violence(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-06)Public workfare programs targeted at women have the potential to empower them economically by providing jobs. However, the impact of public workfare programs on gender-based violence is theoretically ambiguous. They may contribute to its reduction through lowering financial stress or improving a woman’s bargaining position due to independent income. Yet, a woman’s higher income may also create incentives to use violence for extractive purposes; putting women in a position of provider at home and in male dominated sectors outside the home may create a backlash because these positions violate gender norms. Working outside the home could reduce exposure to an abusive spouse, but it may increase harassment or assault outside the household. This paper analyzes the impacts of a public workfare program in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, a lower-middle-income Asian country, where the government randomized implementation of a public workfare program targeted at rural women who received an average payment of US$550 over 18 months. The findings show that the program was successful in increasing female income, but it did not change women’s experience of gender-based violence: comparing program participants and control group women, there is no differences in self-reports of intimate partner violence (controlling behavior, emotional violence, or physical violence), violence from other members of the household, or violence from perpetrators outside the household. Some design aspects of this particular program may have resulted in the lack of impacts on gender-based violence. Changes in the design and implementation of public workfare programs are needed for them to work as a mechanism to reduce gender-based violence.Publication Who Benefits from Better Roads and Why? Mixed Methods Analysis of the Gender-Disaggregated Impacts of a Rural Roads Project in Vietnam(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-04)The literature lends empirical support for the idea that improvements to transport infrastructure lead to economic development. How and why the benefits of better transport differ between genders is less clear. This paper attempts to answer this question by combining a nonexperimental impact evaluation of a large-scale rural roads project in Vietnam with qualitative data collection. The paper finds that roads improve economic opportunities for agricultural production and trade: all households increase agricultural trade. Yet only households headed by men capitalize on these opportunities, experiencing an increase in agricultural output and income. Production and income do not increase in households headed by women. The result seems to be driven by a lower level of household labor and access to capital in female-headed households, which constrains their ability to make up-front investments to increase production and income. Overall, the results indicate that female-headed households face constraints in taking advantage of newly created economic opportunities. Coordinating transport investments with complementary development programs addressing these constraints can improve the benefits of better transport for such households.Publication In Light of What They Know(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-11)This paper analyzes how local leaders make targeting decisions in the context of a public workfare program in the Lao People~^!!^s Democratic Republic. The study finds that village heads are progressive in their targeting, prioritizing the poorer households in their villages. The study benchmarks this decentralized selection to the common alternative proxy means test method and finds that village heads are at least as progressive as a proxy means test method approach. To illuminate what poverty-related information village heads could plausibly be incorporating into their internal selection decisions, the study designs and administers a set of exercises for village heads to rank villagers on land ownership, access to nutrition, and experience with recent shocks -- indicators that are likely to differ in their observability to village heads and could plausibly be associated with need for public support. The study finds that village heads~^!!^ perceptions, as revealed through the ranking exercise, differ substantially from actual levels reported in surveys of the villagers themselves. The study then uses a data-driven machine learning approach to identify the predictors of village head selection. It concludes that village heads rely on a combination of easily observable household characteristics, forming a holistic impression of household welfare, rather than specific indicators like actual land ownership, nutrition, or economic shocks.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Design Thinking for Social Innovation(2010-07)Designers have traditionally focused on enchancing the look and functionality of products.Publication Government Matters III : Governance Indicators for 1996-2002(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2003-08)The authors present estimates of six dimensions of governance covering 199 countries and territories for four time periods: 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2002. These indicators are based on several hundred individual variables measuring perceptions of governance, drawn from 25 separate data sources constructed by 18 different organizations. The authors assign these individual measures of governance to categories capturing key dimensions of governance and use an unobserved components model to construct six aggregate governance indicators in each of the four periods. They present the point estimates of the dimensions of governance as well as the margins of errors for each country for the four periods. The governance indicators reported here are an update and expansion of previous research work on indicators initiated in 1998 (Kaufmann, Kraay, and Zoido-Lobat 1999a,b and 2002). The authors also address various methodological issues, including the interpretation and use of the data given the estimated margins of errors.Publication Governance Matters IV : Governance Indicators for 1996-2004(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2005-06)The authors present the latest update of their aggregate governance indicators, together with new analysis of several issues related to the use of these measures. The governance indicators measure the following six dimensions of governance: (1) voice and accountability; (2) political instability and violence; (3) government effectiveness; (4) regulatory quality; (5) rule of law, and (6) control of corruption. They cover 209 countries and territories for 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, and 2004. They are based on several hundred individual variables measuring perceptions of governance, drawn from 37 separate data sources constructed by 31 organizations. The authors present estimates of the six dimensions of governance for each period, as well as margins of error capturing the range of likely values for each country. These margins of error are not unique to perceptions-based measures of governance, but are an important feature of all efforts to measure governance, including objective indicators. In fact, the authors give examples of how individual objective measures provide an incomplete picture of even the quite particular dimensions of governance that they are intended to measure. The authors also analyze in detail changes over time in their estimates of governance; provide a framework for assessing the statistical significance of changes in governance; and suggest a simple rule of thumb for identifying statistically significant changes in country governance over time. The ability to identify significant changes in governance over time is much higher for aggregate indicators than for any individual indicator. While the authors find that the quality of governance in a number of countries has changed significantly (in both directions), they also provide evidence suggesting that there are no trends, for better or worse, in global averages of governance. Finally, they interpret the strong observed correlation between income and governance, and argue against recent efforts to apply a discount to governance performance in low-income countries.Publication Governance Matters VIII : Aggregate and Individual Governance Indicators 1996–2008(2009-06-01)This paper reports on the 2009 update of the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) research project, covering 212 countries and territories and measuring six dimensions of governance between 1996 and 2008: Voice and Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law, and Control of Corruption. These aggregate indicators are based on hundreds of specific and disaggregated individual variables measuring various dimensions of governance, taken from 35 data sources provided by 33 different organizations. The data reflect the views on governance of public sector, private sector and NGO experts, as well as thousands of citizen and firm survey respondents worldwide. The authors also explicitly report the margins of error accompanying each country estimate. These reflect the inherent difficulties in measuring governance using any kind of data. They find that even after taking margins of error into account, the WGI permit meaningful cross-country comparisons as well as monitoring progress over time. The aggregate indicators, together with the disaggregated underlying indicators, are available at www.govindicators.org.Publication Measuring Financial Inclusion : The Global Findex Database(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-04)This paper provides the first analysis of the Global Financial Inclusion (Global Findex) Database, a new set of indicators that measure how adults in 148 economies save, borrow, make payments, and manage risk. The data show that 50 percent of adults worldwide have an account at a formal financial institution, though account penetration varies widely across regions, income groups and individual characteristics. In addition, 22 percent of adults report having saved at a formal financial institution in the past 12 months, and 9 percent report having taken out a new loan from a bank, credit union or microfinance institution in the past year. Although half of adults around the world remain unbanked, at least 35 percent of them report barriers to account use that might be addressed by public policy. Among the most commonly reported barriers are high cost, physical distance, and lack of proper documentation, though there are significant differences across regions and individual characteristics.