Comments by Soohyung Lee, on The Gender Wage Gap in Cambodia

Soohyung Lee: The economic growth and productivity of a country hinge on the efficient supply and allocation of inputs (e.g., Hsieh and Klenow 2009; Hsieh et al. 2019). Thus, the underutilization of female labor can be detrimental to a country's socioeconomic development, considering that women constitute approximately half of the population. In this regard, measuring the gender gap in labor market outcomes and identifying the underlying contributors is an important task for both policymakers and academic researchers. Unsurprisingly, numerous researchers have contributed to this task, with their findings showing that gender gaps have drastically shrunk over the past 50 years in many countries in areas such as educational attainment, labor force participation, and earnings (e.g., Goldin 2014, 2024). However, the extent to which women's socioeconomic status becomes comparable to men's varies by country. Even among developed countries, some—notably South Korea and Japan—exhibit poor utilization of the...