This paper studies the evolution of the gender wage gap in Colombia at different points of the distribution of wages between 1994 and 2010. Our contribution is twofold: First, we compute what the distribution of wages would have been in 2010 had the educational attainment, the proportion of public-sector workers and the proportion of indefinite contracts remained at 1994 levels. The counterfactual distribution is computed separately for each of the three characteristics and simultaneously when the three characteristics are fixed at 1994 levels. We find that the enormous increase in educational attainment has helped to reduce the gender wage gap, mainly at the top of the wage distribution. By contrast, the reduction in the proportion of workers in the public sector and the reduction of workers with indefinite contracts have contributed to increasing the gender gap. On the second hand, we estimate the adjusted gender wage gap, controlling not only for observable characteristics but also for sample selection. Our main finding is a clear glass ceiling pattern in the adjusted gender wage gap in both years.

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