This paper analyzes the gender wage disparities among rural-urban migrants in
urban China using a nationally representative data set. On average, female migrants
earn only 66% of their male counterparts’ average hourly wage. And the gender wage
gap is not uniform across migrants’ wage distribution with differentials much higher
at the top end than at the bottom and the middle. The mean decomposition method
by Fortin (2008) and the unconditional quantile regression by Firpo et al. (2009) are
combined to decompose the distributional gender wage differentials into the contribution
of each covariate. We find that the discrimination effect contributes more to
the wage gap than the endowment effect throughout the wage distribution. Although
the gender wage differential is the largest at the higher end of rural migrants’ wage
distribution, our decomposition results show that gender wage discrimination effect
attributable to unequal returns to observable characteristics is most serious among
low wage earners. How selected labor market characteristics contribute to the discrimination
effect across the whole wage distribution is also investigated.