Occupational Stereotypes and Gender‐Specific Job Satisfaction

• Published date: 01 January 2016
• Author: Simon Janssen,Uschi Backes‐Gellner
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irel.12126
• Date: 01 January 2016

Occupational Stereotypes and Gender-Specific

Job Satisfaction*

SIMON JANSSEN and USCHI BACKES-GELLNER

Using representative data containing information on job satisfaction and workers’

gender-specific prejudices, we investigate the relationship between stereotyping

and job satisfaction. We show that women in stereotypically male jobs are signifi-

cantly less satisfied with their work climate and job content than in stereotypically

female jobs but more satisfied with their income in those same jobs. Our findings

indicate that women trade off their higher income satisfaction against the negative

consequences of stereotyping. As long as we take into account that stereotypically

male jobs are physically more demanding than stereotypically female jobs, men

are generally more satisfied with stereotypically male jobs.

Introduction

Despite the great strides toward gender equality made in many Western

countries over the past 50 years, gender segregation remains persistent, with

women crowded into lower-paid jobs with worse career prospects (Johnson

and Solon 1986; Kidd and Goninon 2000; Macpherson and Hirsch 1995). In

fact, two thirds of either the female or male labor force would have to change

their occupations to achieve gender equality (Goldin 1986). While earlier liter-

ature argues that individuals choose occupations consistent with their life-cycle

labor-force participation and family responsibilities (Edwards and Field-

Hendrey 2002; Mincer and Polachek 1974) or link gender segregation to

*The authors’affiliations are, respectively, Institute for Employment Research (IAB), Nuremberg,

Germany. Email: simon.janssen@iab.de; University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland. Email: backes-gellner@

business.uzh.ch.

JEL: J71, J24, J28.

The data used in this paper were collected by the “Bundesinstitut f€

ur Berufsbildung (BIBB)”and the Institute

for Employment Research (IAB) and are documented in the German “Zentralarchiv f€

ur Empirische Sozial-

forschung (ZA).”Neither the producers of the data nor the ZA bear any responsibility for the analysis and inter-

pretation of the data in this paper. This study is partially funded by the Swiss Federal Office for Professional

Education and Technology through its Leading House on the Economics of Education, Firm Behavior and

Training Policies. For comments and suggestions the authors are grateful to Ulrich Kaiser, Jens Mohrenweiser,

and Andrew Oswald, and participants in the T.A.S.K.S workshop, the EALE in Cyprus, and discussants at the

SMYE in Groningen.

INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS, Vol. 55, No. 1 (January 2016). ©2015 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.

71

theories of employer discrimination (Becker 1971), a more recent theory by

Akerlof and Kranton (2000) links occupational segregation to gender-specific

job stereotypes.

Akerlof and Kranton (2000) incorporate the sociological concept of iden-

tity into an economic framework. They propose a utility function in which

identity is associated with different social categories and the ways in which

people in these categories are expected to behave. The theory states that

individuals in occupations associated with the opposite sex have ambiguous

feelings about their work because they violate their own identity or that of

their coworkers and thus suffer a utility loss. Therefore, gender segregation

may persist in the labor market because many people refuse to choose a

job that is stereotypically associated with the opposite sex. Because stereo-

types and utility are difficult to measure, prior studies do not show whether

occupational stereotypes do indeed affect the utility and preferences of indi-

viduals.

Therefore, this paper relies on a very special dataset that allows us to con-

struct an indicator for occupational stereotypes. We use the German “BiBB/

IAB Strukturerhebung”that contains data on 30,000 individuals and is repre-

sentative of the German workforce. In addition to job satisfaction measures,

the data contain detailed information on each individual’s job tasks and a

variable that indicates whether the individual considers her or his job to be

more appropriate for females or males. We use this information to create a

conditional index indicating whether society on average associates each

observed individual’s job with female or male stereotypes. To our knowledge

the BiBB/IAB survey is the only dataset containing this kind of information.

We use this indicator to estimate the relationship between occupational gender

stereotypes and self-reported job satisfaction (as a measure for the individual’s

job utility

1,2

).

The evidence shows that all generations in our sample have relatively strong

prejudices about gender-specific stereotypes in the labor market, and we find a

strong relationship between occupational gender stereotypes and job satisfac-

tion. Considering every aspect of a job, women are not more or less satisfied

in stereotypically male jobs than in stereotypically female jobs. However,

women in stereotypically male jobs are less satisfied with their work climate

and the content of tasks, but they are more satisfied with their income. Thus,

1

By using self-reported job satisfaction as a measure for the individual’s utility arising from work we

follow studies such as Clark and Oswald (1996) and Clark (1997).

2

A number of related studies analyze the general relationship between gender and job satisfaction; e.g.,

Donohue and Heywood (2004); Sloane and Williams (2000); and Sousa-Poza and Sousa- Poza (2000).

72 / SIMON JANSSEN AND USCHI BACKES-GELLNER