Does the Gender Wage Gap Originate at Labor Market Entry? Evidence from South Korea

Abstract

When in the lifecycle does a large gender wage gap emerge? South Korea has the largest gender pay gap in the OECD, 29%. Among recent college graduates the conditional gap is only 4.3% over 2008-2019, falling from 5.0% to 3.0%, and correcting for differential selection into full-time wage employment with semiparametric, machine-learning, and bounds methods leaves it unchanged. Among observed workers what remains sits at the top of the distribution. In Korean panel data the corrected gap widens severalfold across the prime-age workforce, where the selection correction becomes first order. Korea's gender disparity is mostly generated after entry.