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Keywords Job satisfaction, United States of America, Young adults, Gender
Abstract Estimates the determinants of job satisfaction for younger US workers. While age representative data from both the USA and Britain routinely show women reporting greater job satisfaction, this is not true for the younger US cohort in National Longitudinal Survey of Youth sample. Finds no gender satisfaction gap, but does find that the job satisfaction of women is less sensitive to both actual and comparison earnings than that of men. Moreover, estimates an expanded specification showing substantial gender differences in the influence of fringe benefit provision (including childcare) on job satisfaction. The expanded specification also demonstrates that while general skills are associated with greater job satisfaction, specific skills are associated with lower job satisfaction, argues that the results are in keeping with human capital theory.
1. Introduction
Renewed interest in the economics of job satisfaction has generated a sizable body of findings. Job satisfaction is U-shaped in age (Clark et al., 1996), higher for non-union workers (Bender and Sloane, 1998; Clark, 1996; Heywood et al, 2002), for the less educated (Clark and Oswald, 1996) and for those with lower "comparison income" (Clark and Oswald, 1996). The determinants of job satisfaction appear broadly similar across industrial democracies (Blanchflower and Oswald, 1999). Yet, among the most uniform findings in the USA and Britain is that women report greater job satisfaction than men (Bender et al, 2002; Clark, 1996, 1997; Clark and Oswald, 1996; Sloane and Williams, 1996, 2000; Sousa-Poza and Sousa-Poza, 2000).
This paper contributes to the growing literature on job satisfaction in two ways. First, we argue that gender differences in job satisfaction among young workers in the USA should be attenuated or absent. Indeed, the evidence we present from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) shows that females in this younger US cohort do not report greater job satisfaction. Instead, we find evidence that gender differences in job satisfaction vary by occupational group. Blue-collar (manual) males report greater satisfaction than blue-collar females, a result largely offset by white-collar (non-manual) females reporting greater satisfaction than white-collar males. Further, we find that the job satisfaction of women in the USA is less sensitive to comparison income than that of males. In addition, young males...