POLICY BRIEF - Investigating the Gender Wage Gap in the Nigerian

In 2018/19, the gap is bigger at the bottom than at the top of the wage distribution, which is evidence in favour of a sticky floor in the Nigerian labour market. [...] While previous studies are informative about the gender wage gap in Nigeria, there is limited knowledge of the nature of the gender wage gap at various points of the earnings distribution, the factors underpinning it and how these have evolved over time. [...] Based on these objectives, the determination of sectoral wages and salaries in the public sector has been the responsibility of the Salaries and Wages Commission and administrative arms of the government. [...] These include: difficulty in identifying the exclusion restrictions appropriately; the measurement of the error problem; the presence of heteroscedasticity; and the identification and validity of the assumptions that underlie the distribution. [...] This implies that it was the returns to characteristics that explained the wage gap over the entire distribution in the 2003/2004 period and not the characteristics of the sexes.