数字普惠金融与城镇居民性别收入差距OACHSSCD

Gender income gaps have attracted extensive scholarly and policy attention.Existing studies have mainly explained these gaps through employer discrimination and gendered divisions of household labor,while giv-ing less attention to how changes in financial service provision may shape gendered income outcomes.Digital finan-cial inclusion provides a useful setting for examining this issue,but whether digital financial inclusion narrows or widens gender income gaps remains an empirical question. Using data from the 2018 and 2023 waves of the Chinese Household Income Project(CHIP),this study exam-ines the relation between digital financial inclusion and the gender income gap among urban residents in China.In-dividual-level CHIP data are matched with the city-level Digital Financial Inclusion Index of China.The dependent variable is the logarithm of annual income,and the key explanatory variable is the lagged and standardized city-lev-el digital financial inclusion index.The empirical model controls for individual,household,and city-level charac-teristics,as well as province and year fixed effects.The main coefficient of interest is the interaction between digital financial inclusion and a female dummy variable. The results show that digital financial inclusion is positively associated with individual income growth,and that this association is significantly stronger for women.The positive and statistically significant interaction term indi-cates that digital financial inclusion is associated with faster income growth for women than for men,which is con-sistent with a narrowing of the urban gender income gap.This finding remains robust across alternative specifica-tions,including corrections for labor market selection,tests for potential endogeneity,and alternative sample re-strictions.Among the subdimensions of the index,use depth shows the strongest association with women's relative income gains,suggesting that actual engagement with digital financial services is especially important. Heterogeneity analyses reveal that this gender-equalizing association is stronger among rural-hukou urban resi-dents and among individuals with high school education or below.Mechanism analyses provide supportive evidence for two pathways.First,after adjusting for observable selection into self-employment,digital financial inclusion is positively associated with the income of existing self-employed women,suggesting that it may ease business-related financing constraints.Second,digital financial inclusion is positively associated with women's relative hourly in-come,and this association is stronger in households with heavier care responsibilities. These findings suggest that policies should move beyond expanding basic access and place greater emphasis on deepening women's actual use of digital financial services.Digital financial inclusion should also be linked with support for women's self-employment,micro-entrepreneurship,and family care arrangements,so that financial serv-ice convenience can be more effectively translated into women's income growth and a narrower gender income gap.