The paradox of the contented female worker: the mediating role of income and the moderating role of sexual orientation

Abstract

Employing longitudinal data, we examine how income mediates, and sexual identity moderates, the gender-job satisfaction relationship using the theoretical lens of human capital theory. We find that income does mediate the gender-job satisfaction relationship and that the mediated relationship between gender and job satisfaction is moderated by sexual identity. Our main result is that income is a stronger driver of the gender-job satisfaction relationship for lesbians than it is for straight women. Theoretical and practical implications of this result are discussed.

Keywords:

• Sexual identity
• job satisfaction
• human capital
• income

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the three anonymous referees for their useful comments on earlier versions of the paper. This paper uses unit record data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey. The HILDA Project was initiated and is funded by the Australian Government Department of Social Services (DSS) and is managed by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research (Melbourne Institute). The findings and views reported in this paper, however, are those of the authors and should not be attributed to either DSS or the Melbourne Institute.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Carpenter (2008), who used data from the Australian Longitudinal Survey of Women’s Health, is one of the few studies to find a lesbian wage penalty, but that study was restricted to a female sample aged 22–27, so might not be representative of lesbians as a whole. The findings in Sabia et al. (2017) are more in line with the international literature on this topic.

2. Nonetheless, as a robustness check on the main results, we included and controlled for bisexual, other, prefer not to say and unsure/don’t know as dummy variables in all specifications. The conclusions for the four hypotheses were the same as those reported in the tables below that do not include and control for these categories.

3. One might be concerned that if individuals change jobs between waves that this muddies the true relationship between job satisfaction and income. However, less than 10% of the sample changed jobs between waves 10–11 and 11–12. When we exclude these individuals from the data-set, the results are quantitatively similar to those reported below.

4. In 2017 Australia had a plebiscite on same sex marriage in which 61.6% voted in favour of same sex marriage. The Federal Parliament subsequently legislated to legalise same sex marriage, allowing the gay and lesbian population to legally marry their same sex partner from 2018.