such classification, this is bound to be imperfect. Altogether, the results may be reflective of these limitations.

# 6. Conclusions

We establish that the gender wage gap persists in Vietnam despite the fact that women have achieved similar levels of education as men or even surpassed men at higher levels of education. We also demonstrate that sorting into different occupations and industries explains a non‐trivial portion of this gap.

Although occupational sorting is a phenomenon common to labor markets, relatively little is known empirically about what drives occupational sorting and when it emerges. Our analysis is a first step in this direction. We offer three explanations of the emergence of occupational sorting and test these empirically using data from Vietnam. We find little support for a hypothesis of occupational sorting being driven by social norms, which affect aspirations at a young age and subsequently influence human capital accumulation decisions. We also do not find evidence for a hypothesis of occupational sorting occurring due to the gender specific differences in the school‐to‐work transition.

We do find support for the hypothesis that women have stronger preferences than men for favorable non‐monetary job characteristics such as having a formal contract, social insurance, health insurance, paid leave and shorter weekly hours. This is in line with a broad body of literature starting from Becker (1985) which points to the unequal distribution of the burden of household responsibilities affecting women’s labor force participation and earnings. Interestingly, we find that stronger preferences for favorable non‐ monetary job characteristics are reflected in the aspirations of girls at the age of 12.

These results point towards two streams of interventions. First, interventions that enable women to better balance household and market roles may prove effective. These include making childcare services more easily available, allowing flexible and gender‐neutral parental leave policies (Jenkner and Correa, 2017) or allowing flexible work arrangements such as telecommuting (Dettling, 2013). The design of such interventions requires further attention. For instance, policies that mandate the provision of social services to women by their employers can increase the costs of hiring women and be counterproductive ‐ Prada, Rucci and Urzua (2015) find that the starting wages of women were lower after the introduction of mandated employer‐provided childcare in Chile in the firms that were required to comply with this legislation. Similarly, simply expanding the number of spots available for childcare may not be sufficient to have an impact on female labor force participation if it does not tackle the demand side constraints to accessing childcare. Taking the example of the Government of Chile’s large plans for expansion of childcare services, Mateo‐Diaz and Rodriguez‐Chamussy point out that 9% of spots remained unused in the largest national program, Junta Nacional de Jardines Infantiles (JUNJI). They highlight the importance of factors such as affordability, distance to home, and opening and closing hours of the centers.

Second, changing cultural norms about household work to enable a more equitable distribution of the burden of household responsibilities will likely have impacts. Promundo, for instance, has a number of 29