Mind the gender pay gap: Nexus between sociocultural identity, occupational segregation and distributional effects in Serbia (GPGIDENT)

This project is implemented by the Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Belgrade in cooperation with the Institute of Economic Sciences. The research was supported by the Science Fund of the Republic of Serbia Project IDENTITIES, Grant No. 1587. The GPGIDENT project is among 16 projects selected for funding from an initial 160 project proposals.The project leader is prof. Dr. Gorana Krstić and other team members from the Faculty of Economics and Business are prof. Dr. Jelena Žarković, Dr. Aleksandra Anić and Dr. Dragan Aleksić, while Dr. Marko Vladisavljević is from the Institute of Economic Sciences. Project will be implemented from April 2023 to April 2025.

This project will use a multidisciplinary approach, quantitative and qualitative methodology and different survey data to generate new knowledge and evidence about the nexus between gender pay gap (GPG), occupational segregation and identity issues in Serbia. It addresses the following research questions: How does the GPG vary across the wage distribution in a given year and between 2016 and 2021? Is there an evidence of the larger gap at the top of the wage distribution or at the bottom? How much of the gap is attributable to differences between males and females in their characteristics (education, labour force experience, sectoral and occupational segregation) and how much is attributable to differences in the wage that they receive for the same characteristics, with the later possibly interpreting as discrimination? What is the volume of occupational segregation by gender? How gender identity affects the choice of occupation? How socio-cultural identity aspects are associated with GPGs at different parts of the wage distribution? To identify specific rather than general sources of the GPG we will decompose the GPG along the entire wage distribution using the recentered influence function regressions with reweighting procedure. To examine the scale of occupational segregation by gender we calculate the dissimilarity index and decompose GPG across occupations by estimating separate occupational wage equations by gender, as well as through the estimation of an occupational attachment model. We will use matching techniques to investigate how socio-cultural identity issues are linked with the GPG. By using qualitative research through focus groups and interviews we reveal aspects of gender identity not covered in the survey data that may affect occupational segregation. Rich set of new scientific evidence will be communicated to various stakeholders with intention to stimulate evidence based policy making in Serbia.