While the implementation of equal pay has significantly reduced earnings differences
between men and women, gender income inequality still remains a global problem
(Blau and Kahn 1994; Katz and Autor 1999; Brainerd 2000). Globally, women earn 20%
to 30% less than men (Kossek et al. 2005). In France, the gap between men’s and women’s
pay stands at around 22% for those entering the labour market for the first time in the early
1990s, whereas this difference was 15% for people in the same situation in the late 1970s
(INSEE 2002). Gender wage inequality ranged from 10% to 54% in urban industries and
from 20% to 45.7% in the rural sector in the 1990s in China (Meng 1998; Gustaffson and Li
2000; Hughes and Maurer-Fazio 2002). The size of gender wage differential in China
is similar to that ofRussia and other developed counties (Blau andKahn 1994;Brainerd 2000).