Gender inequality and the gender-job satisfaction paradox in Europe

Despite being paid less than men and facing worse working conditions, lower promotion opportunities and workplace discrimination, women typically report higher levels of job satisfaction. Twenty years ago Andrew Clark (Clark, 1997) suggested that this might be due to their lower expectations, driven by a number of factors related to current and past positions in the labour market. Although this hypothesis is one of the leading explanations of gender differences in job satisfaction, cross-country research on the relationship between gender inequality and the gender-job satisfaction gap is rare and only descriptive. In this paper, we use the data from EU-SILC module on subjective well-being from 2013 to analyse adjusted gender-job satisfaction gaps in 32 European countries and we relate them to country differences in gender inequalities. Our results provide extensive and robust evidence of a relationship between exposure to more gender equal settings in the early stages of life and smaller gender gaps in job satisfaction. This corroborates the hypothesis that women who grew up in contexts with higher gender equality have expectations increasingly aligned to those of their male counterparts. Our results also show that being employed in typically male occupations enables this alignment too, whereas higher levels of education do not play a similar effect.