Gender pay gaps in the young adult labor force: prejudice-based discrimination or misreading of the observed-to-offered wage relationship?

This article investigates the role of prejudice-based discrimination in explaining wage differences between young men and women (ages 18–35) across eleven European countries using data from the Cultural Pathways to Economic Self-sufficiency and Entrepreneurship (CUPESSE) Project. After adjusting for human capital, labor market selection bias, and other factors through country-specific regression and Oaxaca–Blinder decompositions, evidence suggests that gender-based wage discrimination is plausible in Greece, Italy, Spain, Czechia, Hungary, and the UK, while no such evidence is found for Austria, Denmark, Switzerland, or Germany. The study highlights that in countries with discrimination evidence, women's wages would increase if their human capital were remunerated like men's, whereas in the latter group, labor market conditions and institutional factors better explain wage differences. Limitations include the focus on young adults early in their careers, oversampling of unemployed individuals and women, and incomplete occupational data, which affect the generalizability and interpretation of unexplained wage gaps as discrimination.