Abstract:While improving production efficiency and employment quality, industrial digitization has also reshaped the distribution mechanism of the labor market, resulting in new characteristics of the wage-income gap between different genders of the labor force. Reasonably identifying the effects of industrial digitization on the gender wage gap can help solve the problem of the gender wage gap in the new era and promote sustainable economic development. This paper constructs a theoretical model based on the idea of “production task” and the “muscle-brain” hypothesis, and builds a comprehensive evaluation index system of industrial digitization from the perspectives of industrial digitization and service industry digitization. Based on matching micro-individual data from the China Labor Dynamics Survey (CLDS) in 2014, 2016 and 2018, we empirically examine the impact of industrial digitization on the gender wage gap. The results show that industrial digitization can significantly reduce the gender wage gap, and the conclusion still holds after robustness and endogeneity tests. Sub-sample regression finds that the effect of industrial digitization on reducing the gender wage gap is more pronounced in the group with a lower level of labor force skills and a relatively higher level of regional economic development. Further analysis reveals that industry digitalization inclines to improve female wage in the low and middle-income groups and can reduce the gender discrimination faced by middle-income groups in the labor market. Compared with the previous literature, this paper expands on the following three aspects: firstly, the theoretical model is constructed by combining the idea of “production task” and the “muscle-brain” hypothesis to analyze the effect of industrial digitization on the gender wage gap, which enriches the theoretical framework of the effect of industrial digitization on the gender wage gap and expands the convergence channel of the gender wage gap; secondly, on the basis of empirically testing the impact of industrial digitalization on the gender wage gap and taking into account the characteristics of China’s labor market, we further analyze the heterogeneity of the impact of industrial digitalization on the gender wage gap in terms of skill levels and levels of regional economic development, so as to provide a reference for the formulation of an effective policy for narrowing the gender wage gap; thirdly, with the help of unconditional quantile regression and decomposition, we analyze the effect of industrial digitization on the gender wage gap at different income quartiles, and analyze the constituent factors affecting the gender wage gap, so as to provide empirical experience for scientifically solving the problem of gender wage gap of the labor force nowadays. The findings of this paper explain, to a certain extent, the effect of industrial digitization on the gender wage gap, help to formulate a development model more suitable for the digitization of traditional industries in China, and provide a strong empirical basis for the targeted formulation of industrial digitization policies to reduce the gender wage gap. This will better promote female employment, optimize the employment structure of the labor market, and release the “gender dividend”.