Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/208201 
Year of Publication: 
2019
Series/Report no.: 
IDB Working Paper Series No. IDB-WP-1056
Publisher: 
Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), Washington, DC
Abstract: 
Recent years have seen an ever-greater expansion of the digital economy, a development that may bring new opportunities to workers who were at a disadvantage in the traditional economy. We focus on a specific set of workers who belong to such a group: women. We study a skill set of particular relevance in the digital economy and estimate their returns in the labor market, according to gender, across four Latin American countries. We find that information and communication technologies (ICT) skills and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) skills yield significant positive returns for both men and women. However, there is a significant gender gap that favors men on the STEM returns. There is also a sizable gender gap regarding the amount of skills accumulated by gender. Through an Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition, we estimate that up to 80% of the gender gap in hourly wages may be due to the lower returns that women receive, relative to men, on their STEM skills. If an investment in skills relevant to the digital economy may be beneficial for the labor market performance of both men and women, why returns to STEM exhibit such strong gender asymmetries remains an open and relevant question.
Subjects: 
Digital economy
STEM
Gender wage gap
Return to skills
JEL: 
J16
J31
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by-nc-nd Logo
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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