Cross‐National Analysis of Gender Differences in Job Satisfaction

• Author: Donald R. Williams,Laetitia Hauret
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irel.12171
• Published date: 01 April 2017
• Date: 01 April 2017

Cross-National Analysis of Gender Differences in

Job Satisfaction

*

LAETITIA HAURET and DONALD R. WILLIAMS

Research over the past two decades has found significant gender differences in

subjective job satisfaction, with the result that women report greater satisfaction

than men in some countries. This paper examines the so-called “gender paradox”

using data from the European Social Survey for a subset of fourteen countries in

the European Union. We focus on the hypothesis that women place higher values

on certain work characteristics than men, which explains the observed differential.

Using estimates from Probit and ordered Probit models, we conduct standard

Blinder–Oaxaca decompositions to estimate the impact that differential valuations

of characteristics have on the gender difference in self-reported job satisfaction.

The results indicate that females continue to report higher levels of job satisfac-

tion than do men in some countries, and the difference remains even after control-

ling for a wide range of personal and job characteristics and working conditions.

The decompositions suggest that a relatively small share of the gender differential

is attributable to gender differences in the weights placed on working conditions

in most countries. Rather, gender differences in job characteristics contribute rela-

tively more to explaining the gender–job satisfaction differential.

Introduction

At least since the publication of Hodson’s“Gender Differences in Job Satis-

faction: Why Aren’t Women More Dissatisfied?”(1989), social scientists have

sought to understand the gender difference in job satisfaction found in many

studies. The topic has been especially interesting given the commonly held

perception that women work in “worse”jobs than men (i.e., with lower pay,

*The authors’affiliations are, respectively, Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER),

Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg. E-mail: Laetitia.hauret@liser.lu; Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, and

LISER. E-mail: dwilliam@kent.edu. The authors are grateful to Arnaud Dupuy; Philippe Van Kerm; seminar

participants at LISER; and participants in the 2013 IMPALLA/ESPANET conference in Belval, Luxembourg

for their helpful comments. All opinions and any errors found herein are the responsibility of the authors.

Williams gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic

Research visiting scholar scheme.

JEL: J16, J28.

INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS, Vol. 56, No. 2 (April 2017). ©2017 Regents of the University of California

Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington

Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK.

203

less opportunity for career advancement, lower benefits, and less desirable

working conditions), yet report higher levels of job satisfaction. While this

“gender paradox”was first studied in the United States and Britain, the differ-

ence has been observed in other countries in Europe (Sousa-Poza and Sousa-

Poza 2000b) and in Australia (Kifle and Hailemariam Desta 2012), as well.

Sousa-Poza and Sousa-Poza (2000b), however, using data from the 1997 Inter-

national Social Survey Program (ISSP), conclude that the gender differential

does not occur in all countries. While women are found to have higher average

levels of job satisfaction in the United States and Great Britain and a few other

nations, they are less satisfied than men in the majority of the twenty-one

countries studied (Sousa-Poza and Sousa-Poza 2000b). Using data for the

countries combined, and controlling for several job characteristics (and country

dummies), Sousa-Poza and Sousa-Poza (2000b) find no significant gender dif-

ference in job satisfaction in an ordered Probit model. Using data from the

European Household Community Panel (ECHP) for the 1994–2001 time per-

iod, however, Kaiser (2007) finds, in contrast to the results presented by

Sousa-Poza and Sousa-Poza (2000b), that women have higher levels of job

satisfaction than men, on average, in a pooled sample from fourteen countries

in the EU.

Indeed, assuming men and women have different job characteristics, even

finding no difference in job satisfaction is a surprise. Given the role that job

satisfaction can play in worker productivity, absenteeism, and turnover, and

hence the productivity of firms and other organizations, understanding the

determinants of job satisfaction and any gender differences that exist has

important economic implications. Hodson (1989) described three potential

hypotheses to explain the gender differential that had been observed in the

United States in the 1960s and 1970s. First, attributed to Kanter (1977), is the

idea that men and women “value different characteristics of work,”or put dif-

ferently, place different values on given work characteristics. A second is that

women placed greater emphasis on their “homemaker”roles (relative to paid

work). Third, and perhaps related, was the explanation that women had lower

expectations or compared themselves with other women rather than with men,

and so were more satisfied with what they had. This third explanation has

been the focus of much work on the topic over the past 15 years, starting with

the seminal analyses of Clark (1997) and Clark and Oswald (1996). One

important implication of the third hypothesis is that the gender differential in

job satisfaction would be expected to decrease over time, as male and female

job expectations converge, especially with the introduction of new cohorts of

women to the labor market (Clark 1997; Donohue and Heywood 2004; Kaiser

2007).

204 / LAETITIA HAURET AND DONALD R. WILLIAMS

The current paper contributes to the literature in several ways. First, using

data for fourteen countries participating in the European Social Survey in

2010, we address the question of whether the raw gender difference in job sat-

isfaction has persisted in Europe. This data set is more recent than ECHP or

ISSP data used by others to study Europe. Second, we conduct the analysis at

the regional level and are therefore able to compare results across a variety of

institutional environments and cultures. Third, and most importantly, we focus

particularly on the hypothesis that men and women place different values on

job characteristics, and estimate the contribution that this makes to explaining

male and female job satisfaction using the Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition

technique (Blinder 1973; Oaxaca 1973). Little work has examined the hypoth-

esis that men and women in Europe place different values on the characteris-

tics of their jobs. More precisely, we seek to identify how much of the

difference in job satisfaction is due to the fact that (i) women and men have

different working conditions, (ii) women and men value job characteristics dif-

ferently, and (iii) women tend to be more satisfied even with identical job

characteristics.

The paper is organized as follows. We first provide a more extensive review

of the literature regarding the determinants of job satisfaction and the gender

paradox. This is followed by a description of the data and the methodology

used in the study. Empirical results are then presented, with conclusions and

topics for further research in the last section.

Review of Gender Job Satisfaction Literature

Compared with sociologists and psychologists, economists are relative new-

comers to the study of the determinants of job satisfaction, which is part of a

larger literature on the determinants of well-being. Several studies in the mid-

1970s (Borjas 1979; Freeman 1978; Hamermesh 1977) first established subjec-

tive job-satisfaction measures as legitimate for study by economists, despite

several caveats. Generally, researchers model job satisfaction as functions of

sociodemographic characteristics (gender, race, education, marital status, etc.),

job characteristics (occupation, sector, wage, opportunity for advancement,

type of employment contract, hours of work, demographic composition of the

company, etc.) and local labor-market conditions. Nearly all of the early stud-

ies find that women report higher levels of job satisfaction than do men, after

controlling for other variables.

Clark (1997) was the first after Hodson (1989) to focus on the gender differ-

ential, using data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). Extending

the relative well-being concept, Clark (1997) argued that women are more

Gender Job-Satisfaction Differential / 205