International Journal of Manpower

Purpose – The paper's aim is to study the determinants of gender differences in early career in Mongolia, one of the 50 poorest countries of the world.

Design/methodology/approach – The analysis takes advantage of an ad hoc school to work survey (SWTS) on young people aged 15-29 years carried out in 2006. Extended and augmented Mincerian earning equations are run and then the Juhn-Murphy-Pierce (JMP) decomposition method is applied to them to disentangle the quantity effect, the price effect and the residual wage distribution.

Findings – On average, female wages are not lower than those of males. However, although not statistically significant among teenagers (15-19), the conditional gender gap becomes significant and sizeable for the over-20s. The JMP decomposition shows that most of the gap is due to differences in the way the market values the same characteristics of men and women: in fact, quantity effects tend to reduce, whereas price effects tend to increase the gap. If wages were paid equally, women should have 11.7 per cent more for their higher education attainment and overall 22 per cent more, a substantial gap for the low earnings of Mongolians.

Research limitations/implications – Future research should assess the impact of aspirations of young people on their labour market choices.

Practical implications – The analysis shows that gender differences emerge in concomitance with women establishing a household and giving birth, suggesting that the current interventions to help mothers cope with maternity are insufficient. Changing this outcome is important to reach the Millennium Development Goals.

Originality/value – Labour market issues in Mongolia are under-studied, not to mention gender differences in early career. This paper fills some of the gaps.