Glass ceiling in a stratified labor market: Evidence from Korea

• Market structure as a crucial factor in determining the glass ceiling in Korea.
• The glass ceiling intensive in a peripheral labor market rather than the core.
• The differential application of gender related institution by firm size.
• Gender-complicated stratification in the labor market.
• Customized policies for the cohorts with the intensive glass ceiling.

We verify the glass ceiling effect through separate quantile regression and the wage difference decomposition methods. We also study the gender wage gap after dividing the labor market into core and peripheral sectors considering structural labor market characteristics, such as firm size, employment type, and education level. According to empirical analysis, we find that the glass ceiling effect for irregular female workers with lower levels of education working in small and medium-sized companies is much stronger compared with those in other sectors under the multi-layered Korean labor market structure. This result implies that the glass ceiling effect is weak in the core sector, while in a peripheral sector, invisible gender discrimination increases as the wage quantile moves from lower to higher levels. Based upon these empirical results, we discuss a policy direction that deals simultaneously with the dual structure of the labor market and gender discrimination.