Explaining the gender gap in job satisfaction

ABSTRACT

In general, women report greater job satisfaction than men. The existing literature cannot fully explain the nature of this difference, as the gap tends to persist even when controlling for job characteristics. In this paper, we study job satisfaction using recent data for 28 EU countries. Women, on average, are more satisfied than men and the gap remains even when we account for a wide range of personal, job and family characteristics. However, the gap disappears when we include job preferences, as women place greater importance on work-life balance and the intrinsic desirability of the work.

KEYWORDS:

• Job satisfaction
• job preferences
• gender
• occupational choice

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• J16
• J24
• J28

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ While discrimination may have improved since the publication of Clark (1997), a gender wage gap, which is largely unexplained, persists in Europe (Redmond and McGuinness 2019).

² A score of 8 is chosen as the cut-off as this corresponds to the median satisfaction score.

³ As there are few observations in the bottom three categories, the 0–10 scale is collapsed into five categories: 1. (0, 1, 2); 2 (3, 4); 3 (5, 6); 4 (7, 8); 5 (9, 10).