Glass ceilings, sticky floors, or sticky doors? A quantile regression approach to exploring gender wage gaps in Sri Lanka *

The extension of standard decompositions of mean wage gaps to the examination of conditional wage gaps across the distribution using counterfactual analysis based on quantile regression has led to a new approach to the examination of “glass ceilings” (Albrecht, Bjorkland, and Vroman 2003; Arulampalam et al. 2007). The term glass ceilings refers to the phenomenon that “women do quite well in the labor market up to a point, after which there is an effective limit on their prospects” (Albrecht, Bjorkland, and Vroman 2003). Thus, larger wage gaps, conditional on covariates, at the top of the wage distribution would be consistent with the existence of “glass ceilings”.