Decomposing the Gender Wage Gap in Europe: Evidence from the Tourism Sector

Abstract

Unfavourable labour conditions in the tourism sector and the gender wage gap have been found to be significant in studies carried out for different countries, demonstrating that this is an international phenomenon. However, its study has only been addressed in a singular way in specific countries, such as Spain, Norway, UK, Portugal, Italy or USA (Burgess, 2003; Santos and Varejão, 2007; Skalpe, 2007; Thrane, 2008; Campos Ortega and Ropero, 2009). To our knowledge, no international comparisons with supranational database have been carried out to explain the heterogeneity of the gender wage gap between countries and its main determinants. This paper uses a micro and macro perspectives simultaneously, through a multilevel approach, which may be helpful for understanding how the characteristics of the employees of each country (compositional effect) and how the country characteristics (contextual effect) can affect the differences at European level in the gender wage gap and its discriminatory component in the tourism sector.