Welfare regimes and gender gaps in job satisfaction across Europe. Evidence from the European Working Survey

Often women report higher levels of job satisfaction than men, although their jobs are worse than men’s jobs. Evidence on this paradox, which is known as the ‘gender-job satisfaction paradox’, is still controversial. This paper focuses on gender differences in job satisfaction across groups of countries in the European Union. The following five groups of countries have been considered: 1) Nordic countries, 2) Anglo-Saxon countries, 3) Continental countries, 4) Southern European countries, and 5) Eastern European countries. For the empirical analysis, data from the Sixth European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS6), collected in 2015 and released in 2017 (EWCS 2017), were employed. To examine the gender job satisfaction gap, a continuous and normally distributed dependent variable derived from a principal component analysis (PCA) of six questions in the survey was employed. An Oaxaca‒Blinder estimation was implemented after unconditional quantile regression (UQR) to capture gender gaps for different levels of job satisfaction. The results are in line with the main literature and show that the paradox is mostly disappearing. However, the paradox persists in the Anglo-Saxon and the Southern European countries.