How Gender-Based Disparities affect Women’s Job Satisfaction? Evidence from Euro-Area

Abstract

This paper analyses how gender-based disparities in the Euro-Area affect women’s job satisfaction using the EWCS (2015), and the Global Gender Gap Index introduced by the World Economic Forum. Heckman's two-stage estimates show that women have a higher probability of job satisfaction than their male colleagues, which endorses the paradox of the female contented worker. There does not seem to be an equalization of job satisfaction as higher educational levels and lower age groups are considered. In those settings where the situation of women is more unfavourable than that of men, the probability for women to be more satisfied at work is lower. Therefore, the adaptive expectations hypothesis, by which individuals would internalize the difficulties they face and, ceteris paribus, would experience greater satisfaction than their counterparts, in this case males, is not corroborated.