Gender Di¤erences in Job Satisfaction and Labour Market Participation: UK Evidence from Propensity Score Estimates

This paper applies propensity score methods in order to investigate whether British female workers’ higher level of job satisfaction simply re‡ects a correlation due to the presence of systematic di¤erences in personal and job characteristics by gender or to a sample selection problem. The conclusion is that it does not, since it is found that there is a signi...cant positive e¤ect of being female on job satisfaction, which does not disappear even when the estimation is based on the most careful matching of male and female workers. An alternative explanation relies on expectations. If job outcomes are evaluated relative to expectations, women’s higher job satisfaction may re‡ect that they have lower expectations regarding their jobs because of their traditionally poorer position in the labour market. JEL Classi...cation: C14; J16; J22; J28.