Gender Disparities at Work over the Lifecourse: Are Women Less Satisfied with the Main Job of Their Working Career?

Monika Oczkowska , Warsaw School of Economics SGH

Within the strand of the literature related to gender differences in job satisfaction a substantial part of the studies consistently proves higher levels of satisfaction with the currently performed job among women. This phenomenon is observed for a broad spectrum of countries, even when controlling for an extensive set of usual confounders. What is important from the perspective of this study, previous analysis concentrated solely on satisfaction with the job one has at the time of responding to the respective survey. This means that an important part of the working age population was not covered by them - those out of work at that certain time, which typically is a much bigger share of female than male working-age population. Using data from the retrospective part of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), we take a closer look at the working histories of individuals from 28 European countries. The main advantage of this study is a possibility to evaluate job satisfaction with the main job of one’s working career for a more complete pool of workers - all individuals who ever worked during their lives. Leveraging this advantage we find that overall women are in fact less satisfied with the main jobs of their working careers than men. We argue that this result is likely driven by regional specificities related to gender norms prevailing in certain societies.

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 Presented in Session P7. Education, Labor Market, and Economic Issues