While researchers are giving increasing attention to the sex pay gap in Japan, most work focuses on women's lack of access to long-term employment and seniority wages, thus neglecting sex-based wage inequality among regular workers in large firms. Analyzing data collected from a sample of regular male and female workers employed by a large, export-oriented Japanese manufacturing firm, we examine the sources of the sex pay gap among this group of workers. Consistent with previous research on regular workers in Japan, we find that age affects the wages of both women and men and that sex differences in age also help to explain the sex pay gap. In addition, however, we find that women's wages but not men's are negatively affected by the percentage of women in the job and by holding a job that is shared with nonregular workers. Moreover, we find that women are penalized more than men for these job characteristics. Hence, while female regular workers in Japan may be relatively advantaged as compared to other employed women, we find that they also experience a sex pay gap and that this gap stems in part from the wage penalties associated with working in a predominantly female job.
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