The gender-job satisfaction paradox through time and countries

Abstract

Much has been written about the so-called gender-job satisfaction paradox, derived from the fact that a significant number of empirical studies found that women reported higher levels of job satisfaction than their male counterparts, although they had what were considered ‘worse’ jobs in terms of pay and other nonmonetary working conditions. In this article, we use a procedure to compare the relative performance of groups when their achievements are described by distributions of outcomes over an ordered set of categories, the Balanced Worth Vector (BWV), to analyse whether women consistently report to be more satisfied at work than men in different periods of time and countries. The BWV offers a cardinal, complete and transitive evaluation that is based in the likelihood of getting better results. In our setting, the BWV methodology provides a complete ranking of the countries covered by the European Working Conditions Survey according to the relative levels of job satisfaction with working conditions that women and men in each country report. Our results indicate a decreasing gender differential over time and substantial differences across countries, proving that the gender-gap paradox cannot be considered a widespread phenomenon.