Gender Wage Differences in Soviet and Transitional Estonia

We use the retrospective, covering the years 1989 - 1994, Estonian Labor Force Survey to examine potential wage discrimination against women. We look at fulltime workers of Estonian and Russian ethnicity in the years 1989, the Soviet period, and 1994, the last full year of the survey and three years after Estonian independence and the beginning of the transition to a market economy. We find substantial evidence of wage discrimination against women in both years. In fact, despite the official rhetoric of gender equality in the Soviet Union, our results indicate the relative level of wage discrimination against female workers in Estonia changed very little between 1989 and 1994 when occupational dummies are excluded from the wage equations.