Are women really that happy at work? Australian evidence on the ‘contented female’

Abstract

This article investigates the apparent paradox of females possessing higher levels of job satisfaction compared to their male counterparts despite possessing worse employment outcomes. Postulating that the female workforce is heterogeneous by age, education and the presence of children, we create four groups; the aggregated, young and childless, young with children and the educated. The article finds statistical evidence of significant gender differences, though not uniformly so. Econometric results, however, paint a muddier picture, indicating that statistical results alone should not be used to categorically report incidences of gender differences in job satisfaction. Sample-selection bias results also evince sub-group heterogeneity and require further study. The determinants of job satisfaction vary between measures and sub-groups, though not necessarily so across gender. In sum, the article finds that the paradox does exhibit itself for the aggregated and young and childless sub-groups, but is largely absent for the young with children group. As well, there is a clear bifurcation in job satisfaction between genders for the educated sub-group. This suggests that employed females should not be viewed as a monolithic bloc in the labour force.

Keywords:

• job satisfaction
• gender

JEL Classification:

• A13
• J16
• J28

Acknowledgements

This article 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 Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaHCSIA) and is managed by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research (Melbourne Institute). The findings and views reported in this article, however, are those of the authors and should not be attributed to either FaHCSIA or the Melbourne Institute.

Notes

¹ These are overall job satisfaction, satisfaction with pay, satisfaction with job security, satisfaction with type of work, satisfaction with hours worked and satisfaction with work-life balance (flexibility). See Appendix Box A1 for detailed coverage.

² This delineation closely follows on from the seminal work done by Long (2005), as both articles utilize the same data set.

³ Expectation proxies were recorded in wave one of the data set used, but not repeated in subsequent years. Given that the theory suggests that expectations will change over time, we are unable to include these variables in our analysis.

⁴ Some authors create a predicted (log) wage variable from a standard Mincer equation and use it as a comparison income against which individuals compare themselves (Clark and Oswald, 1996; Sloane and Williams, 2000; Donohue and Heywood, 2004; Lévy-Garboua and Montmarquette, 2004; Senik, 2004; Gao and Smyth, 2010; de la Garza et al., 2010). A drawback of this approach is that it is difficult to find suitable exclusion restrictions that validate the method (de la Garza et al., 2010). Validating the assumption underlying the predicted reference wages measure is problematic because it presumes that respondents compare themselves to an average worker hypothesized and defined by the statistician. Another possible limitation to the use of predicted wages as proxy to comparison wages is that it may reflect a misspecification, if this variable has a significant effect (Clark and Oswald, 1996).The predicted wage variable can be significant merely due to a correlation between own wages and unobserved determinants of overall job satisfaction (Ravallion and Lokshin, 2001).

⁵ Newer waves are replenished for attrition though the potential for attrition bias still exists.

⁶ Long (2005) also looked at the ‘generally dissatisfied’ (those answering between 0 and 5). Our results were largely consistent between both groups.

⁷ Full results available upon request.

⁸ This hypothesis arose from the work undertaken by Kifle et al. (2013), who found that females (irrespective of age) with children aged below 5 years at home who work tend to be less satisfied than females with older children or indeed with no children at all.

⁹ Full results available on request.

¹⁰ Note that children at home in this article refers to the presence of any child(ren) of any age, not just those aged below 5 years.

¹¹ There is no finding for the two young groups as one sub-group has no children while, in the other, all have children.