EuroEconomica, Vol 34, No 1 (2015)

Abstract

The paper assesses the sources of gender-based wage differentials and investigates the relative importance of the endowment effect, female disadvantage and male advantage in explaining gender-based wage differentials in the Cameroon labour market. Use is made of the Ordinary Least Square technique and the Oaxaca-Ransom decomposition. Oaxaca-Ransom decomposition results show that primary education, secondary education, tertiary education and professional training are sources of the gender pay gap.  Our results also underline the importance of working experience, formal sector employment and urban residency in explaining wage differentials between male and female workers in the Cameroon labour market. Our findings reveal that education human capital explains a greater portion of the endowment effect and contributes little to the discrimination effect. Essentially, we observe that the discrimination effect has a worsening effect on the gender pay gap compared to the mitigating role of the endowment effect. Again, our results show that a greater part of the discrimination effect of the gender pay gap is attributed to female disadvantage in the Cameroon labour market.