Summary: | 碩士 === 國立高雄大學 === 應用經濟學系碩士班 === 103 === Over the past few decades, the wage of male workers is always higher than that female in the labor market. The wage of female was only about 67.5% of those of males in 1978, and it increased to 82.5% in 2013. Although the gender wage gap tended to shrink over time, the differences between male and female still exist. The main purpose of this thesis is to investigate the relationship between gender wage gap and choices of major. Firstly, we use 1978-2013 Manpower Utilization Survey and analyze the gender differences in both of majors and wage gaps. The observed data seems indicate that the gender preference of choices in majors is correlated with gender wage gaps. Then, we apply the standard Oaxaca decomposition to investigate the wage gap between male and female workers. The estimated results show that the average wage of male is 29.3% higher than female from 1978 to 2013. Most of differences in gender wage gaps are caused by the unexplained component which stands around 75.5% to 81%. For workers with senior occupational high school education and above, the size of gender wage gaps are in descending order as follows: Business, Medicine, Agriculture, Engineering, Police, Science, Law, Literature and Education. Our empirical results also show that the higher the workers’ education, the less the proportion of the differences in wage gap cannot be explained by gender differences in endowment. Finally, after controlling for industry and occupation, choices of major still can enhance the explaining power of the model, which indicates that choices of major play an important role in explaining gender wage gaps. However, the importance of majors in explaining the gender wage gaps has decreased over times.
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