So here's an interesting thing. Despite being disadvantaged in the workforce, women report higher levels of job satisfaction than men. It's a strange paradox. We know that women have access to fewer opportunities than men - there are occupational fields they struggle to get into, and have a much harder time getting into senior posts than men do. They also get paid less, and are assumed to be less capable than their male counterparts, meaning that they have to work harder and perform better than men to achieve the same rewards. When children come along, their choices are yet more constrained as employers' perception of the value they can add in the work place goes down and their domestic responsibilities increase relative to men's. And yet, consistently, they report being happier at work than men, and women working part time report being the happiest of all.
There are a few different theories that have been put forward to account for this paradox. The first is the 'grateful slaves' view of Hakim (2000) which suggests that for women, the opportunity to work part time or flexibly is enough - they don't need high salaries or interesting roles to be happy at work, as long as they can pick their children up from school, nothing much else matters. The second theory is the 'making the best of a bad job' idea from Walters (2005) which suggests that women know that their opportunities are constrained, but they also know that their hands are tied, they aren't going to be able to do anything about it, so might as well just get on with it and be as positive as they can. The third theory is by Clark (1996) which suggests that job satisfaction is significantly related to what he calls 'relative income', described as the difference between what you expect to earn and what you actually earn. His theory is that women's expectations of pay are low and so they end up pleasantly surprised by their earnings and this increases their levels of satisfaction. Each of these theories has some empirical backing, and seems to account for some of the differences in levels of satisfaction between men and women, but by no means all of it.
A more recent study by Zou (2015) indicates that the key to solving the puzzle lies in what they call different work orientations.
Job satisfaction is made up of a range of different specific work features, and Zou's study suggests that women and men tend to derive their job satisfaction from different aspects of work. They describe five different work orientations:
Intrinsic orientation: getting your job satisfaction from the joy of the job itself
Extrinsic orientation: valuing pay and promotion
Effort orientation: work load and hours
Future orientation: personal and career development
Human orientation: interpersonal relationships
Their study found two interesting things. First, that people who are highly orientated towards intrinsic and human factors are most likely to have higher levels of job satisfaction, and then second, you've guessed it, women are more likely to have stronger orientations to intrinsic and human factors.
So, women work because they are interested in the jobs themselves, and because they like the people. Men also work for these reasons, but tend to think that pay and promotion and career development are more important. And it just so happens that intrinsic motivation and relationships are factors which link closely with job satisfaction.
These different orientations go some way to explaining career choices. Men are more likely to be orientated to pay and promotion, so perhaps push for higher salaries, choose higher paying occupations and focus more on getting promoted. Women are less interested in these things so don't go out of their way to make them happen.
But where does that leave us? Job satisfaction has always been my first goal as a career practitioner, and on this measure women are way ahead. But does that mean that we should stop trying to encourage women to go for promotions? I don't think so, although we don't want to be so keen to make women's lives better that we end up making their lives worse.
The Nordic model is interesting. Scandinavia has what is considered to be the most progressive regime for women, and though ideology and legislation has reached a point where women's participation in the labour market is fairly similar to men's. They have more women working full time than anywhere else in Europe, which is thought to be a real positive, but given that we know that women working part time are happier than women working full time, is this really the right aspiration for the rest of us?
One important issue that I can't see how to resolve is that of power in society. My instinct is to say that what we need to do is re-model our social values, and stop conceptualising pay, promotion and status as the signs of success. If we could start to value job and life satisfaction as much, or more, than money, then we could find ourselves in a society that accords women who work part time in female spheres and lower level jobs as equal to men who command higher salaries and have more senior roles. But how is this ever to be managed?
A less extreme range of salaries across the country could perhaps help. If senior roles were paid only a bit more than junior roles, then other factors would take on a more significant role in people's career development choices. At the moment, the increase in salary associated with promotion is so great that it overshadows other considerations - people go for promotions because of the money, regardless of whether they actually think they will be happier in these more senior roles. If the financial incentives were only marginal, then people might be more likely to take a balanced view of promotion, going for it only if it ticks a number of boxes for them. We might well then see more of a balance in the senior roles, as they will attract people who are motivated by a range of different factors, and not just those (disproportionately men) who are motivated by money.
On a more individual level, if we can find ways to encourage men to pursue options which don't just satisfy their monetary motivation, then they might end up being happier in the workplace. And this will allow for more opportunities for women to find a wider range of options which can meet their needs. Much of the push towards gender equality is focused on women - empowering them to make bolder choices. But I wonder if here, I am suggesting that actually it's men who need to be re-educated to work out what is going to make them happy?
Just as an aside, I think the literature on job satisfaction is a bit patchy and part of the reason for that is that there are so many things that seem to be linked to it, yet academics seem to hone in on just one or two, meaning that we don't have a particularly good overall picture. A lot of the large scale studies have been done by economists, for example, who seem convinced that income is the most important thing to study, which is a bit strange, given that we know that income has only a small, weakly significant correlation with job satisfaction (Judge et al.'s 2010 meta-analysis found a correlation of 0.15 p<0.05)
References
Clark, A. E. (1996). Job satisfaction in Britain. British journal of industrial relations, 34(2), 189-217.
Hakim, C. (2000). Work-lifestyle choices in the 21st century: Preference theory. OUp Oxford.
Judge, T. A., Piccolo, R. F., Podsakoff, N. P., Shaw, J. C., & Rich, B. L. (2010). The relationship between pay and job satisfaction: A meta-analysis of the literature. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 77(2), 157-167.
Walters, S. (2005). Making the best of a bad job? Female part‐timers’ orientations and attitudes to work. Gender, Work & Organization, 12(3), 193-216.
Zou, M. (2015). Gender, work orientations and job satisfaction. Work, employment and society, 29(1), 3-22.
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