Paradox Lost: The Disappearing Female Job Satisfaction Premium

Abstract

Using the original data source of Clark, we show that over the last two decades the female satisfaction gap he documented has vanished. This reflects a strong secular decline in female job satisfaction. This decline happened both because younger women became less satisfied as they aged, and because new female workers entered with lower job satisfaction than their early 1990s peers. Decompositions make clear that the decline does not reflect changing job characteristics for women but rather their increasingly less favourable evaluation of job characteristics. These findings fit with the suggestion that women in the early 1990s had a gap between their labour market expectations and actual experience that has since closed and that the gender satisfaction gap has vanished as a consequence.

Fear of Robots and Life Satisfaction

“…A score of below 0.5 is given a label of unacceptable, a score between 0.5 and 0.6 is miserable, a score between 0.6 and 0.7 is mediocre, a score between 0.7 and 0.8 is middling, a score between 0.8 and 0.9 is meritorious and a score between 0.9 and 1.0 is marvellous[45] 8. A similar argument has been put forward to explain the finding that women report higher job satisfaction than men[14] although Green et al[39] find that, overtime, women's job expectations in Britain rise and this gender gap vanishes.…”

Sexual Orientation and Job Satisfaction: Survey-Based Evidence from Sweden

“…If the heterosexual women in our sample are selected in a similar way while lesbian women are not, this could explain the lower job satisfaction of lesbian women. However, Green et al (2016) show that the female job satisfaction gap, documented by Clark (1997) in the UK, has more or less disappeared over time, largely driven by a less favourable evaluation of job characteristics as more women have entered the labour market. This indicates that married women in more recent cohort are less likely to be a selected sample.…”

Four Decades of the Economics of Happiness: Where Next?

“…All four of these groups are likely to have higher expectations regarding the labor market. Sousa‐Poza and Sousa‐Poza () noted that the gender job satisfaction gap in BHPS data has been shrinking over time, which is consistent with women's rising expectations, and the most recent contribution using the BHPS finds that it has disappeared completely (Green et al ., ). Stevenson and Wolfers () also find evidence of falling female happiness in a number of countries.…”