You can’t always get what you want: gender differences in job satisfaction of university graduates

Abstract

Previous literature stressed on the gender differences in job satisfaction and the factors influencing the job satisfaction of men and women. Two rationales are usually provided for the finding that women tend to be relatively more satisfied with their jobs than men although disadvantaged in labour markets: first, women may have relatively lower expectations of career and income, and second, they may attach relatively less importance to extrinsic rewards than men. In order to analyse whether substantial gender differences exist already at the beginning of the career, we employ information of over 20 000 graduates collected through a large-scale survey of German university graduates who recently entered the labour market. We find that the job satisfaction of female graduates is on average slightly lower than the job satisfaction of male graduates, but our results do not point to substantial gender differences. In our sample of highly qualified individuals, men and women are very similar in what they want from their jobs and also in their perceptions of what they get. While our results point to substantial similarity of men and women in the early career stage, gender differences may emerge at later stages of the career life cycle.

Keywords:

• job satisfaction
• gender differences
• working conditions

JEL Classification:

• J16
• J28
• J81

Notes

¹ Other studies refer also to the perceived importance of job attributes, but denote this as work value (Kalleberg, 1977; Clark, 1997), aspiration level or preferences which indicate aspiration levels (Aletraris, 2010; Schokkaert et al., 2011).

² Although it can be expected that objective working conditions explain perceived job rewards, it must be noticed that subjective evaluations of work may not fully reflect objective conditions (Weaver, 1978).

³ These results are discussed in a companion paper that is available on request.

⁴ An ordered probit coefficient does not provide information about the sign of the effect on any other particular category and about the magnitude of marginal effects. Variables’ marginal effects have to be calculated for each category separately.

⁵ However, the results reported by Millán et al. (2013) suggest that self-employed individuals are more likely to be satisfied with their present jobs in terms of type of work but less likely to be satisfied in terms of job security.