Working Paper
Unequal expectations

Gender inequality in salary expectations of university students

Students’ expectations about their future wages are established in the literature as relevant determinants of the choices made for education progression and, at the university level, for the area and course to be studied.

In this paper, the first comparable analysis in sub-Saharan Africa, we examine the evidence and causes of unequal wage expectations of Mozambican university students prior to their transition to the labour market. The measurements of segmentation, stratification, and inequality decomposition are applied to better understand the underlying causes of these.

They uncover a strong suggestion of anticipated labour market gender-based discrimination among high-skilled workers in Mozambique, as they prepare to transition from school to work.