Globally, legal provisions that require equal pay for work of equal value to address the potential for such biased perspectives are common (currently covering workers in at least 95 countries) and becoming more so. The effectiveness of these legal remedies to at least partially reduce the gender pay gap is well established. For instance, Cruz and Rau (2016) find the introduction of equal pay provisions in Chile reduced the firm premium gender gap by 6.1 percent, an effect driven primarily by increased bargaining power for women. All OECD countries have some form of equal pay for work of equal value provision, and in recent years, many advanced economies have strengthened provisions to include mandatory pay transparency to make equal pay provisions more effective. For instance, in 2018 the Government of Iceland introduced a law requiring all employers with more than 25 staff members to publish detailed pay information, and in regulatory filings firms must actively prove they give equal pay for work of equal value.

But such equal pay provisions are absent across most of Central Asia. In the Kyrgyz Republic, there is no explicit equal pay for work of equal value provision in the labor code or other regulations focused on employee pay.<sup>3</sup> Likewise, Kazakhstan does not explicitly require equal pay for work of equal value.<sup>4</sup> Uzbekistan alone mandates equal pay for equal work provisions, which were included in Uzbekistan’s labor code signed into law by President Mirzoev in October 2022 and entered into force in April 2023. This is the first explicit provision of this type in a Central Asian country to protect workers from pay discrimination.<sup>5</sup> To shed light on the potential role of beliefs about the value of women’s work compared to that of men in explaining the gender wage gap, a survey experiment was included in three nationally representative surveys in Central Asia in 2022. The experiment took the form of vignettes about workers with randomly assigned characteristics that were read aloud to approximately 4,500 residents of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, and Uzbekistan. Each respondent was asked about a set of 8 vignettes per interview, each of the eight focused on a specific occupation. The list of occupations was standardized such that every respondent was told one vignette for the same 8 occupations in the same order. Following each vignette, respondents were asked whether they thought the person described was: “severely underpaid, underpaid, fairly paid, overpaid, or severely overpaid.” Over the course of two months more than 70,000 evaluations of fair earnings were gathered in this form.

The results show a clear and systematic bias against the value of women’s work. Even though the prompts were identical in every other respect, respondents were 13 percent more likely to say wages were “severely overpaid” when the person described in the vignette (subject) was a woman, and 34 percent more likely to say they were “severely underpaid” when the subject was a man.

The findings suggest that the social context is on average biased against women with the same profile as a man, which likely plays a significant role in perpetuating gender inequality in the labor market and the size of the gender wage gap in Central Asia. The presence of this systematic bias against women reinforces the importance of legal provisions to ensure equal pay for work of equal value, and the importance of challenging and changing the norms that perpetuate gender inequality more broadly.

> 3 Details from the World Bank’s Women Business and the Law report are summarized here:

> - <u>https://wbl.worldbank.org/content/dam/documents/wbl/2021/snapshots/Kyrgyz republic.pdf, accessed October 27, 2022.</u> 4 Details from the World Bank’s Women Business and the Law report are summarized here: <u>https://wbl.worldbank.org/content/dam/documents/wbl/2021/snapshots/Kazakhstan.pdf.</u>

> 5 Details from the World Bank’s Women Business and the Law report are summarized here: <u>https://wbl.worldbank.org/content/dam/documents/wbl/2021/snapshots/Uzbekistan.pdf, accessed October 27, 2022.</u>

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