Gender wage inequality during Sri Lanka’s post-reform growth: A distributional analysis

This paper investigates gender wage inequality in Sri Lanka during 1992–2014, a period of robust economic growth following pro-market reforms. The gap in mean wages between men and women decreased steadily over this period. Unconditional quantile regression reveals the decline in gender wage inequality was driven by the upper half of the distribution, and was due to improvements in women’s observable human capital. Yet, the pay structure became...