Gender Job Satisfaction Paradox in Europe: The Role of Differences in Job Characteristics and Their Evaluation

Introduction

Contrary to a large body of research suggesting that women have lower wages, generally work under worse working conditions, and are also worse off in terms of discrimination, job content, and opportunities for promotion, women are often as satisfied or even more satisfied with their jobs than men (e.g., Clark, 1997; Hauret & Williams, 2017; Keiser, 2005; Perugini & Vladisavljevic, 2019; Sousa-Poza & Sousa-Poza, 2003). This finding has been confirmed in numerous studies in economics, sociology, organizational psychology, and management. Given the consistency of the finding, this phenomenon in the literature was labelled as the “paradox of gender job satisfaction”.

Kanter (2008) suggests that women have higher job satisfaction because they value other job characteristics such as flexibility, good relationships with colleagues and superiors, a supportive work environment, and work-life balance, etc., even if these jobs are associated with lower wages and worse working conditions. According to this explanation, the “bundle of characteristics associated with women’s jobs” highly valued by women is sufficient to compensate for lower wages (Sloane & Williams, 2000; Bender et al., 2005). A complementary explanation is that women place less value on their paid work and more value on their role as “homemakers” (Hauret & Williams, 2017). Conversely, men may place more value on job characteristics such as higher salaries and promotions, typically associated with higher status, thus creating a long-standing gap in male and female burden in household chores (Dilhmani, 2021).

However, researchers rarely examine the role of job characteristics in the paradox of gendered job satisfaction. In most of the studies researchers focus on self-assessed working conditions, rather than job characteristics themselves. Hauret & Williams (2017) examine how the job satisfaction gap is affected by working conditions rather than job characteristics, Dilhmani (2021) focuses on the role of job flexibility, quality of social relations at work and task characteristics, while Bender et al. (2005) focus on one particular work condition – flexibility.

This chapter aims to fill this gap by analysing the most recent pan-European job satisfaction data to estimate the extent of the job satisfaction gap, examine how gender differences in job characteristics may explain this gap, and how men and women attribute different values to these characteristics. We examine the role of the following job characteristics: wage (log hourly), working hours (level and square), firm size, type of contract, occupation, and sector of activity, consistent with their ILO definitions.

The chapter contributes to the literature in several ways. First, it uses the latest pan-European job satisfaction data from the 2018 special module on Well-being EU-SILC to estimate gender differences in job satisfaction. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to explain the paradox with characteristics consistent with the ILO definitions – present in EU-SILC data. Second, the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition (Blinder, 1973; Oaxaca, 1973) examines the rules of differences in job characteristics and whether women and men assign different values to job characteristics. In other words, the decomposition allows us to examine the following questions: (1) Does the gender job satisfaction paradox in Europe persist after controlling for individual and job characteristics? (2) Which job characteristics are most important for gender differences in job satisfaction? and (3) Do women and men assign different values to job characteristics?