policies in East Asia and the Pacific is limited, studies from Latin America and the Middle East suggest that well-designed active labor market policies can help to improve women’s employment outcomes. Affirmative action policies have also been used to overcome gender-specific barriers to employment, whether those barriers are due to implicit or overt discrimination in hiring and promotion. Although the literature continues to debate the benefits and costs of affirmative action, the evidence (largely from high-income countries) suggests that carefully designed policies can help break down barriers to female employment with few or no adverse effects on firm productivity (World Bank 2011g). Affirmative action hiring and promotion in the public sector can also have important demonstration effects. For example, in 2004, the government of Malaysia introduced a public sector gender quota of 30 percent female representation across all decision-making levels, including positions from department head to secretary general (ASEAN 2008).
Notes 1. Using cross-country data for selected Asian economies, Meng (1996) found no significant relationship between economic development and the relative earnings of men and women. In fact, gender inequality in earnings within the East Asia and Pacific region was worse in high-income countries such as Japan and the Republic of Korea than in the low- and middle-income countries. 2. Unfortunately, data constraints prevent looking at birth age-cohort patterns within the majority of countries in the region. 3. Gender wage gaps do not capture earnings differences among all men and women of working age. First, they miss a large fraction of the workforce, notably those in unpaid work or self-employed workers. Second, since there may be differential selection between males and females into the labor force—and into wage employment rather than entrepreneurship and agriculture—gender wage gaps are also likely to reflect these selection decisions. 4. Aggregate relative wage data should, however, be treated with caution since it confounds
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differences in human capital and experience, occupational and sectoral selection, underlying ability, selection into the labor market, and discrimination. 5. Household surveys in Thailand and Vietnam corroborate this. In urban areas, women are approximately 10 percentage points less likely to receive benefits than men in Vietnam, whereas they are 3 percentage points less likely to do so in Thailand. In the postreform period in China, a growing number of women and urban workers have been pushed into temporary, part-time, insecure, or low-paying work in the informal sector (Yuan and Cook 2010). 6. Notably, an individual is defined as working in the informal sector if he or she works in agriculture or is self-employed, is working in the household enterprise, or is working as an unpaid family worker. However, an individual is classified as working in the formal sector if he or she works as a legislator or manager, professional, technician or associate professional, or plant machine operator or assembler, or is in the armed forces. 7. Elementary occupations consist of simple and routine tasks that mainly require the use of hand-held tools and often some physical effort. For a more detailed explanation, please refer to the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO) by the International Labour Organization. 8. Care should be taken when interpreting the data from Samoa, Timor-Leste, Tonga, and Vanuatu because of very small sample sizes. 9. Evidence from across the world suggests that firms with greater female representation in management display lower levels of gender inequalities, including wage gaps and inequalities within firms (Cohen and Huffman 2007; Graves and Powell 1995; Huffman, Cohen, and Pearlman 2010). 10. Occupational and industrial segregation by gender is detrimental for labor market efficiency and welfare for four principal reasons (Anker 1998). First, men and women are not working in occupations or industrial sectors to which they are best suited and most productive but are rather choosing their work based on other factors. This trend reduces overall incomes and aggregate productivity. Second, gender-based segregation increases labor market rigidity and reduces the ability of labor markets to respond to economic reforms and labor market shocks, such as those
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