Trends in Gender Pay Gap: Is There A Glass Ceiling or Sticky Floor in Turkey?

There is a large literature on gender wage gap examining the magnitude and reasons for earning differences
between men and women. Usually, human capital endowments, occupational composition and gender norms
are offered as the primary explanations behind the persistently lower wages of femaleemployees. In morerecent
studies, it has been also shown that women are closing the gap in terms of education and skills, and
occupational segregation is improving in number of economies. Yet, many countries remain to have sizable
wage gaps across gender over time and this can be largely attributed to the unexplained or ‘discriminatory’
component. Our paper first investigates theevolution of wage differentials between men and women in Turkey
by considering the period of 2005 and 2017. Our findings show that the mean pay gap has been quite stable
in Turkey and despite the improvements in human capital, there were no significant reductions in pay
inequalities. Then, we look at the glass ceiling and sticky floor effects through quantile regression techniques.
While average female labor force participation is quite low in Turkey and only slightly increased between 2005
and 2017, women with university education has a much higher rate. Hence, we argue that gender wage gap is
distinct for the upper and lower quantiles, and our results illustrate that for the bottom 10th quantile, the gap
rose over time. Finally, we decompose the wage gap across gender to understand the contribution of
endowments and returns to these in the Turkish labor market. Between 2005 and 2017, the unexplained
component of earning differences grew significantly and particularly women with low skills/low wages are
discriminated more. Despite the enhancement of female qualifications, the returns to these qualifications were
worsened over time and as a result sticky floor effect became more visible in Turkey.