Paradox Lost: The Disappearing Female Job Satisfaction Premium

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...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Green, C.P (Author), Heywood, J.S (Author), Kler, P. (Author), Leeves, G. (Author)
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2018
Online Access:View Fulltext in Publisher
Description
Summary: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. © 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
ISBN:00071080 (ISSN)
DOI:10.1111/bjir.12291