The Contribution of Digital Skills to the Gender Wage Gap in 2019-2020 in the Russian Labor Market

Currently, there is a significant difference in average wages between men and women in the Russian labor market. The beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, associated with the acceleration of the digitalization of professions and the growing demand for digital skills of workers, could affect the wage gap between men and women due to the presence of gender differences in the professional structure of work in Russia. At the moment, there are few works investigating the impact of digital change on the gender wage gap. This work analyzes the gender pay gap during the pandemic and the digital transformation of the market in Russia with the use of data from the RLMS HSE and O*NET in 2019-2020. The next objective of this study is to evaluate the contribution of digital skills to the explanation of the gender wage gap using the Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition. The findings show that the gender wage gap in Russia has narrowed compared to the period between 1996-2018. Women, on average, work in professions with a higher level of digitalization and have higher human capital, which includes education, knowledge of foreign languages ​​and digital literacy. Digitization and the level of digital skills have a positive impact on wages. Observed differences in the digitalization index between men and women reduce the gender pay gap.