From Sticky Floors to Glass Ceilings: The Gender Wage Gap over the Life Cycle and across the Wage Distribution in Taiwan, 1990–2023

Abstract

Using eight waves of Taiwan's Manpower Utilization Survey (1990–2023) and machine-learning and distributional methods, this paper documents where the gender wage gap among full-time workers fell and where it persists. The adjusted average gap, estimated by double/debiased machine learning over a rich control set, fell from 35 log points in1990 to 16 by 2015 and has since declined only slowly, to 14 by 2023. Although the gap widens with age in every cross section, synthetic cohorts show it falling by about 1.5 log points per five years within cohorts, a combination of aging and period convergence: the cross-sectional life-cycle profile mostly reflects cohort succession, and what halted after 2015 is within-cohort convergence itself. Causal-forest sorted-effects analysis locates the largest gaps among married, middle-aged workers with children (23 log points in 2023, versus 7 for young single college-educated workers), and distribution regression shows the1995 inverse-U profile giving way to one that rises across the distribution, from 8 log points at the bottom decile to about 20 at the top; gender-specific counterfactuals attribute the pattern to a marriage premium that accrues almost entirely to men. Taiwan's sticky floor has largely disappeared; what remains is a family gap at the top of the distribution, and it is closing very slowly.

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