Do Women Benefit from Minimum Wages

We study how the large and unexpected increase in the minimum wage in Poland impacted the gender wage gap. For this purpose, we employ a distribution regression model coupled with a difference-in-differences estimator that recovers changes in the gender wage gap with minimum assumptions on the counterfactual wage distribution. We find that the increase in minimum wage closes the gender wage gap by almost 4 percentage points at the bottom of the wage distribution with a small spillover effect around the minimum wage. By contrast, at the top of the wage distribution gender inequality continued to grow. Minimum wage increases reduced gender wage gap even in a context of growing inequality.