Gender-based wage discrimination is a highly researched
area of labor economics. However, most studies on this
topic have focused on schooling and paid limited attention
to the mechanisms through which cognitive and
noncognitive skills influence wages. This paper uses data
from adults in seven low- and middle-income countries
that participated in the STEP Skills Measurement Survey
to conduct a comparative analysis of gender wage gaps. The
paper uses schooling and skills measures, including reading
proficiency and complexity of on-the-job computer tasks
to proxy cognitive skills, and personality and behavioral
measures to proxy for noncognitive skills in wage decompositions.
The analysis finds that years of school explain
most of the gender wage gap. The findings also suggest that
cognitive and noncognitive skills affect men’s and women’s
earnings in different ways, and that the effects of these skills
vary across the wage distribution and between countries.