Happy Workers

[differenceblog]

Despite ample evidence that women tend to have worse jobs, studies find that women report equal or higher levels of job satisfaction as men. While many studies seem to focus on the women's relative happiness, asking "Why Aren't Women More Dissatisfied?" (Hodson 1989) or "Why are women so happy at work?" (Clark 1997), few studies seem to examine

Comments

[vinnie_tesla]

My perception is that discussions of gender gaps are usually framed as "why are women acting all weird?" For example, if a political candidate has a larger lead with men than women, pundits will ask why he's having trouble attracting female voters, rather than why he's having success attracting men.

[differenceblog]

Right. I had meant to reference the post of 12/14/06 ("A Question Well Stated") which addressed this issue as well, but the bias towards normal=male is funny and sad.

I was going to say "especially considering that less than half of humans are male" -- but according to Snopes.com, the difference between male and female populations is much smaller than popularly quoted.

[7kim_moon]

My (anecdotal) impression is that, in a hierarchal environment, women are more likely to express their dissatisfaction horizontally (i.e., to their peers) -- either positively (as by seeking support) or negatively (as by sniping or displacing anger). Men, on the other hand, tend more to direct their expressions of dissatisfaction vertically, either positively (referring the matter to higher authority) or negatively (dumping on subordinates).

[differenceblog]

While that makes a lot of sense to me, I don't think that this tendency would reflect much on psychological measures of job satisfaction, which is what I believe the studies are using. They're actually asking the workers how satisfied they are -- but you may be raising a significantly valid point about reporting bias: Do men see the people administering the surveys differently than women? or do men and women see the surveyors the same way, but respond to them differently? And how much does their day-to-day complaining pattern reflect on their response on a job satisfaction survey?

[7kim_moon]

It occurs to me that referring the matter upwards is not necessarily a positive move -- in fact it can be a nastily aggressive manoeuvre. But still, if done with positive intentions it's more positive than taking out one's anger on one's subordinates.