Job satisfaction and the gender composition of jobs

Wages, non-wage characteristics, and predominantly male jobs

“…The overcompensating result is more powerful for men than for women. Usui (2008) corroborates this overcompensating case, using job satisfaction data from the 1979-1982 waves of the NLSY. Both men and women report higher overall job satisfaction and better pay in predominantly male jobs.…”

“…Men prefer the work characteristics in male jobs; while women dislike them, but the wage premium compensates for the disamenities. As an alternative to using a direct measure of job satisfaction as in Usui (2008), this paper explores the issue using information on the wage and the behavioral differences between quits and layoffs. Wage estimates imply that predominantly male jobs pay a premium higher than the compensating differential; and workers place greater overall value on such jobs.…”

Occupational gender segregation in an equilibrium search model

“…3. If women experience disutility from working in jobs with a higher proportion of men, (a phenomenon called employee discrimination, which is supported by empirical evidence using the job satisfaction data in Usui (2008)), 7 the implications for gender segregation are the same as in (2). The difference is the channel: because the women experience lower utility in longer-hour jobs, they prefer to either remain unemployed or to work with other women in shorter-hour jobs.…”

“…According to job satisfaction data from the U.S. National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, women who move to jobs with more men report that co-workers are less friendly and that their physical surroundings are less pleasant, whereas men who move to jobs with more men report that coworkers are more friendly and their surroundings more pleasant (Usui 2008). 8 In Usui (2002), I present an alternative equilibrium search model in which employers can condition job offers by gender. This model is a simple extension of Hwang et al (1998) because profit-maximizing employers post separate offers for men and women.…”

Sharing housework between husbands and wives: how to improve marital satisfaction for working wives in Japan

“…Therefore, the wives' satisfaction with their husbands appears to be strongly related to the spouses' share of housework, but this relationship is not as strong for the husbands' satisfaction with their wives. Next, we estimate the effect of the spouses' share of housework on weekdays and weekends on satisfaction with the spouse by utilizing the satisfaction model presented in Usui (2008). Let the utility individual i receives from marriage at time t be U it and the rate of satisfaction with the spouse be S it .…”