Abstract
This study uses household survey data from five developing Asian economies to explore gender differences in employment, wages, educational attainment, and occupational distributions. These five economies – India, Indonesia, Philippines, Taipei,China, and Viet Nam – span a range of per capita GDP levels and have demonstrated varying success rates in closing gender gaps in education, occupational distributions, and earnings. Taipei, China stands out for its relatively high per capita GDP in the face of strong improvements in women’s educational attainment and labor force participation, but the female-male earnings ratios are not particularly high, not even by global standards. The Philippines is conspicuous for having near gender earnings parity—a rarity globally, not just for its income level. India stands out at the other end of the spectrum for persistently low female labor force participation rates as well as high rates of female illiteracy and the continued clustering of women in low-wage or unpaid jobs in the agricultural sector. In between these extremes lie Indonesia and Viet Nam, well into their structural transformations away from agriculture toward economies dominated more by services and manufacturing, with women in Indonesia experiencing relatively low but improving gender earnings ratios and women in Viet Nam experiencing the opposite: relatively high relative earnings that have been declining in the past decade. Common to all five countries are large unexplained portions of the gender wage gap reflecting unobservable characteristics and gender disparities in returns to worker characteristics that may be undermining any gains that women have made in accumulating education and experience.