Work Transitions, Gender, and Subjective Well-Being

Abstract

We examine the gender differences in the magnitude of the effects of work transitions on subjective well-being using the United Kingdom Household Longitudinal Study data spanning from 2009 to 2016. We use the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12) as a measure of self-reported levels of subjective well-being and apply the propensity score matching technique combined with the difference-in-differences strategy for the analysis. Our findings suggest that men tend to experience larger shifts in subjective well-being when becoming employed or unemployed compared with women; this gender gap is larger when becoming unemployed than employed. We further test and confirm that this gender gap widens between married couples and suggest that social norms or gender roles may be the underlying reasons for the gender differences.