Research On The Impact Of Internet Use On Wages

With the rapid development of economy and the continuous progress of human civilization,gender equality has become an important indicator to evaluate the level of civilization and social development of a country.Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China,our country has advocated respect for women and made continuous efforts to improve women’s social status and promote gender equality.However,gender inequality still exists in the Chinese labor market for a long time,and the wage difference between women and men is obvious.In the 21 st century,Internet technology has flourished,and the Internet has entered every household,changing our way of information exchange,transportation and even learning and work,making our daily work and life have undergone earth-shaking changes.The continuous and widespread application of Internet technology has brought new opportunities to narrow the gender wage gap in China.Based on the previous literature,this paper uses the data of China Family Panel Studies(CFPS)in 2020 to study whether Internet use has reduced the gender wage gap in China based on relevant theories.First,the male and female samples were divided to study the impact of Internet use on their wages,and then the full sample model was added with the gender dummy variable and the Internet use cross item to study whether Internet use reduced the gender wage difference,and on this basis,the heterogeneity analysis was carried out,and the impact of Internet use on the gender wage difference of employees with different wage levels was discussed through quantile regression,Then distinguish mobile devices and computers to study their impact on the gender wage difference of the employed;Next,we use the endogenous transformation model to estimate the processing effect of Internet use on the wage level of male and female employees after solving the problem of "self selection" of the employment of the Internet,and estimate the processing effect of gender wage of the employment of different types of household registration and employment status;Finally,the gender wage difference is decomposed into two parts: characteristic effect and coefficient effect by Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition and RIF unconditional quantile decomposition,and the impact of Internet use on the gender wage difference of employees with different income levels is analyzed.The study found that internet use had a significant positive impact on both male and female employees,and compared with male employees,it had a greater positive impact on the wage level of female samples,reducing the gender wage difference to a certain extent;There is no obvious heterogeneity in the impact of mobile devices and computers on the wages of the employed.Both of them have a significant positive impact on the wages of men and women,and are more conducive to the improvement of the wages of women;The use of the Internet has significantly reduced the gender wage difference between low and middle wage earners,but increased the gender wage difference between high wage earners.According to the estimation of the effect of the endogenous transformation model on the impact of Internet use on gender wages,the wage level of male workers who actually use the Internet is about 1525.85 yuan higher than that when they do not use the Internet;The wage level of female workers who actually use the Internet is about 1797.66 yuan higher than that when they do not use the Internet.The processing effect of Internet use on female workers is significantly higher than that of male workers.Moreover,the result of processing effect estimation shows that Internet use reduces the gender wage difference between rural workers,but increases the gender wage difference between urban workers;It reduces the gender wage difference between self-employed workers to a certain extent,and has basically the same impact on the gender wage of employed workers.By decomposing the gender wage difference,it is found that,on the whole,gender discrimination is the main reason for the gender wage difference in the labor market.The use of the Internet has alleviated gender discrimination to a certain extent.The Internet access characteristics of men and women and the differences in Internet income rates have reduced the gender wage difference to a certain extent.For low-income and middle-income employees,the narrowing of the differences in Internet access characteristics can narrow the gender wage gap,and the use of the Internet has alleviated gender discrimination to a certain extent,making the gender wage gap narrow;For workers with high income levels,the increase in the popularity of the Internet has significantly reduced the gender wage difference,while the use of the Internet has no obvious positive effect on the alleviation of gender discrimination among their groups,but has to some extent increased the phenomenon of gender discrimination among workers with high income levels.Finally,based on the results of the empirical study,this paper summarizes the conclusions of the full text,and puts forward relevant suggestions for reducing the gender wage gap from five aspects: increasing Internet popularization,improving Internet skills,supervising Internet employment platforms,supporting Internet entrepreneurship,and alleviating gender discrimination in the labor market.