۱- Introduction

۲- The gender-job satisfaction paradox and gender inequality

۳- Gender differences in job satisfaction across Europe

۴- Current gender inequality and the job satisfaction paradox

۵- Past gender inequality and the job satisfaction paradox

۶- Discussion and conclusions

References

Abstract

Despite being paid less than men and facing worse working conditions, lower promotion opportunities and work-place discrimination, women typically report higher levels of job satisfaction. Twenty years ago Andrew Clark (Clark, 1997) suggested that this might be due to their lower expectations, driven by a number of factors related to current and past positions in the labour market. Although this hypothesis is one of the leading explanations of gender differences in job satisfaction, cross-country research on the relationship between gender inequality and the gender-job satisfaction gap is rare and only descriptive. In this paper, we use the data from EU-SILC module on subjective well-being from 2013 to analyse adjusted gender-job satisfaction gaps in 32 European countries and we relate them to country differences in gender inequalities. Our results provide extensive and robust evidence of a relationship between exposure to more gender equal settings in the early stages of life and smaller gender gaps in job satisfaction. This corroborates the hypothesis that women who grew up in contexts with higher gender equality have expectations increasingly aligned to those of their male counterparts. Our results also show that being employed in typically male occupations enables this alignment too, whereas higher levels of education do not play a similar effect.

Introduction

In parallel with extensive evidence of women having lower wages, poorer job conditions, and being worse off in terms of discrimination, job content and promotion opportunities, female workers are frequently found to have equal or higher levels of job satisfaction than men (e.g. Clark, 1997; Sousa-Poza and Sousa-Poza, 2003; Kaiser, 2007, Blanchflower et al., 1993). After numerous confirmations of this result, this empirical finding is now referred to as the gender-job satisfaction paradox. The aim of this paper is to contribute to this body of literature, along the avenue traced by Clark (1997), by providing econometric evidence that the existence and the extent of the paradox can be explained by exposure to gender unequal socio-economic settings. To this end, we use micro data from the special module on well-being of the 2013 EU-SILC in combination with various gender inequality countrylevel indicators. The paper adds to the existing knowledge on the topic by: (i) providing extensive and recent cross-country evidence on the existence and size of the gender-job satisfaction paradox in Europe (32 countries, year 2013); (ii) estimating the paradox and its relationship with gender inequality indicators by means of econometric methods able to account for potential misspecification and comparability issues.