How Gender-Based Disparities affect Women’s Job Satisfaction? Evidence from Euro-Area

This paper analyses how gender-based disparities in the Euro-Area affect women’s job satisfaction using the EWCS (2015), and the Global Gender Gap Index introduced by the World Economic Forum. Heckman's two-stage estimates show that women have a higher probability of job satisfaction than their male colleagues, which endorses the paradox of the female contented worker. There does not seem to be an equalization of job satisfaction as higher educational levels and lower age groups are considered. In those settings where the situation of women is more unfavourable than that of men, the probability for women to be more satisfied at work is lower. Therefore, the adaptive expectations hypothesis, by which individuals would internalize the difficulties they face and, ceteris paribus, would experience greater satisfaction than their counterparts, in this case males, is not corroborated.

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Notes

The index is separated according to 4 different criteria: economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival and political empowerment (political). The differences in the GGGI among European (19) countries is exclusively justified by the economic, opportunity and political criteria as the differences according to educational and health criteria are too small, as pointed out by Perugini and Vladisavljević (2019).

See Kim (2005) for a review of studies related to gender and job satisfaction, as well as Green et al. (2017) for a recent review of the paradox of the contented female worker.

The authors add that mobility is more reduced in the case of married men, as would be the aggregated satisfaction levels. Sousa-Poza and Sousa-Poza (2007) note, however, that job dissatisfaction does not lead to the expulsion of women from the labour market but causes a change in the job (i.e. greater job rotation) at least in the Swiss labour market, where their sample is collected.

The evidence in economic literature regarding the existence of a sample-selection bias is mixed. Clark (1997), Sloane and Williams (2000) and Long (2005) point out that there is no evidence of sample-selection bias of females into the labour market while Hauret and Williams (2017) conclude the contrary.

There are other questions in the survey that reflect the degree of worker job satisfaction with respect to specific aspects of their job, but we have preferred to maintain the generality of the question and collect the overall perception of the worker.

Job satisfaction can be sensitive to specific cut-off points, but our results were robust after rerunning our analysis contrasting “rarely” and “never” satisfied to more satisfied (not shown).

The cross-national weights make an adjustment to post-stratification weights to ensure that each country is represented in proportion to the size of its in-work population. Population size adjustments are based on the most recent population figures published by Eurostat or the local statistical office (6th European Working Conditions Survey Weighting report, Eurofond, 2015).

Some of these variables should not be related to job satisfaction. In our case we have included the possibility of having 2 and 3 children or more. These variables are not significant when explaining job satisfaction and have been used in other works to identify the existence of self-selection bias (Clark 2007).

The GGGI is highly correlated (0.778) to the Gender Equality Index, elaborated by the European Institute for Gender Equality, although the disaggregation of the former was more accurate for the purpose of the article, since it includes a specific section on economic participation and opportunity.

The decision to separate the countries into three groups was initially made through the study of the dispersion of the GGGI data. Subsequently, a contrast of means was carried out, considering the different sample sizes of the countries, to observe if the differences were significant. The analysis showed that the consideration of three groups was the most efficient.

We have considered retirement age differences in the different countries and we have performed a robustness check excluding all individuals above 55. Our results are robust by gender and by countries.

In previous studies, the interactions between higher educational levels, younger age groups and the variable female have been studied, and the positive impact of the variable female on job satisfaction continues to be observed.

It is quite possible that the results are partly biased due to the presence of other variables that reflect more accurately the effect of job insecurity.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

1. Faculty of Economics and Business Studies, Avda. de los Castros s/n, 39005, Santander, Spain Adolfo C. Fernández Puente & Nuria Sánchez-Sánchez

1. Adolfo C. Fernández Puente