Gender Wage Gap in Kyrgyzstan Around the 2018–2019 Wage Reforms: Evidence from the Life in Kyrgyzstan Survey

Between 2018 and mid-2019, Kyrgyzstan implemented wage reforms in education, healthcare, and social services, sectors in which women are strongly represented. This study examines gender wage inequality over this reform period using the 2016 and 2019 waves of the Life in Kyrgyzstan survey. The empirical analysis combines OLS wage regressions, supplementary sector-based DiD/DDD specifications, a Heckman sample-selection correction, Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition, and RIF-based distributional methods. The results indicate a persistent conditional wage disadvantage for women in both survey waves. For the mean wage gap, observed worker characteristics explain only a small share, whereas the unexplained component is substantially larger and remains dominant across alternative reference wage structures. Distributional estimates similarly indicate a statistically significant male wage advantage in the lower, middle, and upper parts of the unconditional wage distribution. Differences between 2016 and 2019 are interpreted as changes across survey waves rather than as causal effects of the wage reforms.