The Gender Gap in the Visegrád Group Countries Based on the Luxembourg Income Study

Abstract

Gender equality is a fundamental human right and one of the core values of the European Union (EU). Great efforts have been made to defend this right and to promote gender equality within the member states and around the world. However, there are still significant differences between men and women, especially in terms of income. The main objective of the paper is to compare income distributions for gender groups across four Central European countries, Poland, Slovakia, Czechia and Hungary, i.e., the members of the Visegrád Group (V4). These countries share similar histories and similar economic development, but there are substantial differences between their approaches to economic reforms, including labour market policy. This, in turn, is reflected in different income distributions and income inequality patterns. There is a debated research issue regarding the methodology of measuring the gender gap – the traditional methods based on comparing means and medians seem unsatisfactory as they do not consider the shape of income distributions. The paper’s novelty lies in the application of the relative distribution concept, which goes beyond the typical focus on average income differences toward a full comparison of the entire distribution of women’s earnings relative to men’s. In the paper, we implement a parametric approach for estimating the relative distribution, which allows us to compare and visualise the “gap” between the gender groups at each distribution quantile. The basis for the calculations was the microdata from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS). The statistical methods applied in the study were appropriate to describe the gender gap over the entire income range. The results of the empirical analysis helped to reveal similarities and substantial differences between the countries.