Gender Gap in Expected Wages in Russia: Evidence From Resume Data

Our research paper assesses the gender gap in expected wages in the Russian labor market. Initially, we construct a theoretical model of the gender gap based on a first-price auction with sealed bids and asymmetric distributions. The model demonstrated that women often make concessions when presenting their salary expectations, which leads to a significant disparity between the expected wages of men and women. Furthermore, women tend to avoid competition with men by requesting lower salaries when a larger number of men are contending for a position. In the empirical part of the study, we used resume data from HH.ru to estimate the unexplained gender pay gap. We conducted several methods of assessing the gender pay gap, starting from linear regression to methods based on propensity score indexing. The most comprehensive model, including fixed effects for position, revealed a gap of 18%. Using the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition, we found that differences in the marginal effects of worker characteristics for men and women balance each other out, leading to a pay gap estimate similar to that of the overall linear regression. The inverse probability weighting method allowed us to equalize the distribution of characteristics between genders and assess the effect of the gender pay gap at 16.6%. All three main assessment methods showed similar results, confirming the presence of a gender pay gap in expected wages on the Russian labor market.