Statement of the research question: Tourism activities, such as accommodation, catering, transportation, and cultural services, present a heterogeneous occupational structure from a gender perspective. The gender wage gap in tourism sector may be influenced in a particular way by the unequal participation and working conditions of men and women at the sectoral level. However, this literature does not address how sectoral heterogeneity in the tourism industry may affect the gender wage gap and its discriminatory component. In addition, previous literature has determined that there are factors, such as vertical segregation or the "glass ceiling", that differentially affect specific occupational groups in each sector. Thus, it is of interest to address the main determinants of the wage gap and, in particular, its discriminatory component across the wage distribution.
Objective: We conducted a comparative study of the main determinants of the gender wage gap across the wage distribution in the tourism sector from a sectoral perspective.
Data: This study used the most recent data from the SES-2018 complied by the National Statistical Institute of Spain, which contains matched employee-employer microdata.
Methodology: We propose different wage decompositions across the wage distribution based on unconditional quantile regressions.
Results: In feminised sectors, such as hospitality and travel agencies, the gender wage gap follows an increasing trend across the wage distribution, whereas in masculinised sectors, such as transportation, the gap follows a decreasing trend, becoming nonsignificant at the highest wage levels. Except in the case of transportation, gender wage discrimination increases as wages increase and is the component that explains the major part of this gap. The results show that there are differential barriers to the promotion of women at a sectoral level that perpetuate gender roles, particularly in positions of high responsibility.