A Case of Sticky Floors: Gender Wage Differentials in Thailand

Using 2004 Household Socio-Economic Survey data for Thailand, we explore the gender wage differentials across the entire unconditional wage distribution and find a strong sticky floor effect. Glass ceilings, although observed along with sticky floors in the raw data and pooled regressions, disappear in the counterfactual decompositions, suggesting a strong sticky floor pattern in gender wage differentials in Thailand. Whereas the evidence for most European countries points to glass ceilings, our findings for Thailand are qualitatively similar to those from other South Asian and Southeast Asian countries for which evidence exists; namely, Singapore, the Philippines and Sri Lanka.