Although women are paid less than men, face worse working conditions, lower promotion opportunities, and work-place discrimination, they typically report job satisfaction higher or similar to men's. Twenty years ago Clark (Clark, 1997) suggested that the reason behind women's higher job satisfaction are their lower expectations, driven by a number of factors related to current and past positions of women on the labour market. Although this hypothesis is one of the leading explanations of the gender differences in the job satisfaction, cross-country research investigating the relationship between the gender inequality and gender job satisfaction gap are rare and only descriptive. In this paper we use the data from EU-SILC module on subjective well being from 2013 to analyse adjusted gender job satisfaction gaps in 32 European countries and relate them to the country differences in gender inequalities. Results provide extensive and robust evidence of a relationship between exposure to more gender equal settings in the early stages of life and smaller gender gaps in job satisfaction, once all other possible drivers are controlled for. This suggests that women who experienced higher gender equality have expectations increasingly aligned to those of their male counterparts. Our results also show that this alignment is further favoured by being employed in typically male occupations, whereas higher levels of education do not play a similar effect.

The public health measures implemented to limit the COVID-19 pandemic are likely to affect economic inequalities. In this paper we first provide a theoretical framework to analyse how income inequality contributes shaping the trade-off between economic lockdown and contagion. Our empirical analysis on EU countries shows that the lockdown is likely to significantly increase inequality and poverty and that the magnitude of the change is larger in more unequal countries. To avoid social collapse countries must consider inequality as an additional source of fragility, while supranational, coordinated health and fiscal policies are needed in the interest of all European economies.

The post-2008 recession and the countercyclical responses by European governments that followed triggered an extensive wave of fiscal adjustments. Although underpinned by widespread consensus, the implementation of such measures has also been severely criticised. While their effect on output and employment has been extensively investigated, their impact on wage inequality has received less attention. In this paper, we focus on the consequences of fiscal consolidation measures for gender inequality. After describing the literature-based conceptual framework of our analysis, we provide empirical evidence of the effect of fiscal consolidation on: (i) the adjusted gender wage gap, and (ii) the patterns of gender horizontal segregation. The analysis covers EU-28 countries in the years 2010-13. Results show that austerity measures (both tax-based and expenditure-based) impacted significantly on various aspects of gender wage inequality, putting at risk the relatively little progress achieved in Europe so far.

In this article, we examine the structure of the subjective well-being and its relation to objective well-being indicators using the data from the European Union's Survey on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) from Serbia. This is one of the first papers to analyze a new module on subjective well-being from EU-SILC micro-dataset (with over 20,000 respondents). We investigate the factor structure of the items and the differences in the association of subjective well-being dimensions with objective indicators of well-being within the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Better Life Initiative framework. Three factors emerge from the principal components analysis: general life satisfaction, affective well-being, and satisfaction with the local environment. The analysis further reveals that life satisfaction is more related to the material living conditions, such as income, unemployment, and housing conditions, while affective well-being is more related to non-material indicators of well-being such as perceived health, personal security, and social connections. On the other hand, positive and negative affect within the affective well-being are not clearly separable, nor is the eudaimonic indicator from either life satisfaction or affective well-being.

No abstract