Skip to main content

Advertisement

SpringerLink
Log in

Approval of equal rights and gender differences in well-being

  • Orignial Paper
  • Published:
Journal of Population Economics Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Women earn less than men but are not less satisfied with life. This paper explores whether norms regarding the appropriate pay for women compared to men may explain these findings. We find that the gender wage gap is smaller where a larger fraction of the citizenry has voted in favor of equal pay. We also find that employed women are less (not more) satisfied with life in liberal communities where the gender wage gap is smaller. These findings suggest that norms regarding the appropriate relative pay of women compared to men are shaping gender differences in well-being.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. See, e.g., Blau and Kahn (2000), Stanley and Jarrell (1998), and Weichselbaumer and Winter-Ebmer (2005).

  2. See, e.g., Clark (1997) and Sousa-Poza and Sousa-Poza (2000).

  3. Crosby (1982) calls the same phenomenon the “paradox of the contented female worker” and refers to relative deprivation theory to explain it. Related research is, e.g., discussed in Phelan (1994).

  4. Norms about women’s and men’s role on the labor market do not only affect the outcomes of salary negotiations but also decisions about promotion (for related work on glass ceiling, see, e.g., Albrecht et al. 2003) and advanced training or shared expectations about appropriate effort on the job.

  5. It was understood at the time that primarily, the private sector would be affected by this vote. The public sector had been covered by the ILO equal rights agreement no. 100 that the Swiss government had ratified in 1972 and by a federal law passed in 1977. The amendment did not directly invalidate all contracts between employers and workers that stipulated different pay for equal work. Instead, each contract had to be reviewed separately by the court in order to determine violation of the constitution (Neue Zürcher Zeitung, July 30, 1981).

  6. Headline of an article in the newspaper Blick, June 3, 1981.

  7. Headline of an article in the newspaper Luzerner Neuste Nachrichten, June 4, 1981.

  8. A constitutional amendment has to be accepted by both the majority of people and the majority of cantons.

  9. In reaction to the vote, the Swiss employer’s association printed a booklet to be distributed to its members containing, among other things, the reasons for unequal pay between women and men. “There is scientific proof that women are 30% [note that this figure coincides exactly with the gender wage differential at that time] less productive than men. This finding is based on studies that study the oxygen intake capacity of male and female subjects.”

  10. It would, of course, also be possible to develop an argument why women who voted “no” followed their material self-interest (instrumental voting). Intra-household bargaining theory, e.g., suggests that a woman not working in the labor market is more concerned with the impact of the referendum on her husband’s salary than her own potential salary in the future. To the extent that the amendment leads to overall wage pressure, she would find it in her material self-interest to vote against equal pay. However, the motives for approval or disapproval stated in the survey conducted immediately after the vote do not align with considerations following from intra-household bargaining theory.

  11. Note that it is not possible to rely on different votes to find an equally convincing proxy for the social pay norm. Possible candidates for different votes include the national referendums on extending suffrage to women held in 1959 (rejection) and 1971 (approval). These referendums capture more generally than the present popular initiative the notion of political equality between men and women. As an attractive alternative, surveys tend to focus more directly on values. However, it is usually not possible to rely on them to measure the norms that prevail within communities, as there are not a sufficient number of observations for any communities other than a few big cities.

  12. Note that the information about shared local norms is news only for us as statisticians. However, these norms have been prevalent and at work in these communities for years. What we observe in outcomes with regard to the gender wage gap (Section 4) and the gender subjective well-being gap (Section 5) is not the response to the referendum, i.e., it is not a reaction to the referendum in terms of an information revelation to fellow citizens.

  13. Jann (2003) applies the same technique as used in the work by Jasso and Webster cited in Section 2.1.

  14. Previous research shows that the ratio of the earnings of women relative to men is lowest in Switzerland in comparison with the USA and six other OECD countries (Blau and Kahn 1992). The unexplained component of the wage differential is especially high for workers with low education (Bonjour and Gerfin 2001). Flückiger and Ramirez (2000) analyze the changes in the wage structure between men and women from 1994 to 1996.

  15. The hourly wage rate is calculated by dividing annual earnings by annual hours. We use a Gaussian kernel with default bandwidth in kernreg1.ado for STATA. The “blip” in wages for women and men at 80% voting in favor for equal rights is due to low density of observations at 80% and under-smoothing produced by the default bandwidth.

  16. We use the inverse of the sampling probability as weights because some waves of the SLFS tend to oversample specific areas of Switzerland. Weighting effectively ensures that the results are representative at the national level.

  17. This result is conditional on potential regional differences in schooling, work experience, and tenure.

  18. Differences in prices across communities do not invalidate this conclusion, since prices are identical for women and men across communities.

  19. Results not shown in the text are available on request from the authors.

  20. Ransom and Oaxaca (2005) calculate based on gender differences in the elasticity of separations with respect to the wage earned in the current job that the elasticities of labor supply to the firm are about 3.5 for men and about 2.7 for women.

  21. A second argument in favor of contrasting rural areas with cities rests on the presumption that the fraction of jobs that is tailored entirely to men or women is higher in rural areas than in cities.

  22. The fact that the interaction term “female × approval of equal rights” is larger for cities than for relatively small communities may indicate that place of work and place of residence coincides to a larger extent in the former than in the latter. Moreover, expressed norms in 1981 may be a less accurate proxy for norms to today in small communities due to differences in migration.

  23. The minimum age for voting at the national level was 20 in 1981.

  24. Alternatively, it is likely that individuals, who were relatively old in 1981, are more likely to still be living in the same community than younger individuals. Thus, the voting proxy for the social norms regarding the position of women on the labor market may be better for older cohorts than for younger cohorts. This sample split also allows assessing whether reverse causality is biasing the results. Young women’s attitudes are not measured in the voting proxy of the social norm. For young women, the norm measure therefore reflects the norms of the neighborhood that they have been exposed to.

  25. Note that these results focus on services because the type of work performed by women and men across service industries is more homogenous than across all industries. Results for the remaining 32,365 observations are similar to the results for the private sector services industries (not shown).

  26. On October 12, 1977, the Swiss federal court ruled that female teachers in the canton of Neuchâtel have to be granted the same salary scale as their male colleagues.

  27. The fact that women are, on average, paid less than men in the public sector suggests that unmeasured productive characteristics are important. Unfortunately, it is not possible to address the concern with unmeasured productive characteristics with information on regional mobility because mobility is endogenous. However, note that sorting of unproductive (relative to women) men into liberal areas (or vice versa) is at odds with the evidence in Table 3. We find that there is no correlation of the gender wage gap with voting in industries where appropriate pay norms are unimportant in affecting pay policies, i.e., public sector service industries. This suggests that gender differences in unobserved productivity are unlikely to explain the fact that gender wage gaps are smaller in liberal areas compared to conservative areas.

  28. In a previous study, the role of the social norm to live by one’s own earnings in unemployed people’s life satisfaction has been analyzed. It has been found that the stronger the social norm to work, the less satisfied unemployed people are with their life (Stutzer and Lalive 2004).

  29. Instead, we would observe what Kahneman (2000) called a “satisfaction treadmill”: people report constant well-being even though their “true” individual welfare increases with a higher material living standard (here, a lower gender wage gap). However, if in more liberal communities women’s aspirations increase, their “improved” circumstances need not to translate into higher “true” individual welfare as women experience a “hedonic treadmill effect.” However, we do not think that differences in the response frame hide working women’s suffering due to discrimination in more traditional communities, as we see consistent patterns of evidence across four measures.

  30. This can be understood as procedural disutility (see Frey et al. 2004 for the concept of procedural utility) that affects women’s well-being beyond narrow economic outcomes such as wages.

  31. In a study of 5,000 British workers, Clark and Oswald (1996) formed the reference income as the average income of persons with the same labor market characteristics. They conclude that the higher the income of the reference group, the less satisfied people are with their job.

  32. According to the reasoning in the previous section, there are further variables that can be considered endogenous to the norm like education and other household members’ income. If these variables are excluded, still a negative partial correlation for the interaction term is estimated (not shown).

  33. Estimation results including the partial correlation between unemployment and life satisfaction are based on an extended sample of the SHP and can be obtained from the authors on request.

  34. Our results are in line with existing research on the relationship between gender wage gaps and perceived discrimination. Specifically, several authors find that those women reporting the most gender discrimination face, in fact, the least statistical discrimination (Kuhn 1987; Barbezat and Hughes 1990; Antecol and Kuhn 2000).

  35. Another test of the gender identity hypothesis based on data on reported subjective well-being is by Booth and van Ours (2008). They relate intra-family patterns in working hours to spouses’ life satisfaction.

References

  • Akerlof GA, Kranton RE (2000) Economics and identity. Q J Econ 115(3):715–753

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Albrecht J, Bjorklund A, Vroman S (2003) Is there a glass ceiling in Sweden? J Labor Econ 21(1):145–177

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Altonji JG, Blank RM (1999) Race and gender in the labor market. In: Ashenfelter O, Card D (eds) Handbook of labor economics, vol 3C. Elsevier Science, Amsterdam, pp 3143–3259

    Google Scholar 

  • Antecol H, Kuhn P (2000) Gender as an impediment to labor market success: why do young women report greater harm? J Labor Econ 18(4):702–728

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Babcock L, Laschever S (2003) Women don’t ask. Negotiation and the gender divide. Princeton University Press, Princeton

    Google Scholar 

  • Barbezat DA, Hughes JW (1990) Sex discrimination in labor markets: the role of statistical evidence: comment. Am Econ Rev 80(1):277–286

    Google Scholar 

  • Becker GS (1976) The economic approach to human behavior. University of Chicago Press, Chicago

    Google Scholar 

  • Bewley TE (1999) Why wages don’t fall during a recession. Harvard University Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  • Black SE, Strahan PE (2001) The division of spoils: rent-sharing and discrimination in a regulated industry. Am Econ Rev 91(4):814–831

    Google Scholar 

  • Blanchflower DG, Oswald AJ (2004) Well-being over time in Britain and the USA. J Public Econ 88(7–8):1359–1386

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Blau FD, Kahn LM (1992) The gender earnings gap: learning from international comparisons. Am Econ Rev 82(2):533–538

    Google Scholar 

  • Blau FD, Kahn LM (2000) Gender differences in pay. J Econ Perspect 14(4):75–99

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Blau FD, Kahn LM (2003) Understanding international differences in the gender pay gap. J Labor Econ 21(1):106–144

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bonjour D, Gerfin M (2001) The unequal distribution of unequal pay—an empirical analysis of the gender wage gap in Switzerland. Empir Econ 26(2):407–428

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Booth AL, van Ours JC (2008) Hours of work and gender identity: does part-time work make the family happier? Economica 76(301):176–196

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bylsma WH, Major B (1992) Two routes to eliminating gender differences in personal entitlement: social comparisons and performance evaluations. Psychol Women Q 16(2):193–200

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bylsma WH, Major B (1994) Social comparisons and contentment: exploring the psychological costs of the gender wage gap. Psychol Women Q 18(2):241–249

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Callahan-Levy CM, Messe LA (1979) Sex differences in the allocation of pay. J Pers Soc Psychol 37(3):433–446

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Clark AE (1997) Job satisfaction and gender: why are women so happy at work? Labour Econ 4(4):341–372

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Clark AE, Oswald AJ (1996) Satisfaction and comparison income. J Public Econ 61(3):359–381

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Crosby FJ (1982) Relative deprivation and working women. Oxford University Press, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Davenport HJ (1919) Wage theory and theories. Q J Econ 33(2):256–297

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fehr E, Gächter S (2000) Fairness and retaliation: the economics of reciprocity. J Econ Perspect 14(3):159–181

    Google Scholar 

  • Flückiger Y, Ramirez J (2000) Auf dem Weg zur Lohngleichheit? Eidgenössisches Büro für die Gleichstellung für Mann und Frau, Bern

  • Frey BS, Stutzer A (2002a) Happiness and economics: how the economy and institutions affect human well-being. Princeton University Press, Princeton

    Google Scholar 

  • Frey BS, Stutzer A (2002b) What can economists learn from happiness research? J Econ Lit 40(2):402–435

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Frey BS, Benz M, Stutzer A (2004) Procedural utility: not only what, but also how matters. J Inst Theor Econ 160(3):377–401

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jann B (2003) Lohngerechtigkeit und Geschlechterdiskriminierung: experimentelle evidenz. Mimeo, ETH Zurich

  • Jasso G, Webster M Jr (1997) Double standards in just earnings for male and female workers. Soc Psychol Q 60(1):66–78

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kahneman D (2000) Experienced utility and objective happiness: a moment-based approach. In: Kahneman D, Tversky A (eds) Choices, values and frames. Cambridge University Press, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Kuhn PJ (1987) Sex discrimination in labor markets: the role of statistical evidence. Am Econ Rev 77(4):567–583

    Google Scholar 

  • Major B, McFarlin DB, Gagnon D (1984) Overworked and underpaid: on the nature of gender differences in personal entitlement. J Pers Soc Psychol 47(6):1399–1412

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Manning A (2003) The real thin theory: monopsony in modern labour markets. Labour Econ 10(2):105–131

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Nolen-Hoeksema SK, Rusting C (1999) Gender differences in well-being. In: Kahneman D, Diener E, Schwarz N (eds) Foundations of hedonic psychology. Russell Sage Foundation, New York, pp 330–352

    Google Scholar 

  • Phelan J (1994) The paradox of the contented female worker: an assessment of alternative explanations. Soc Psychol Q 57(2):95–107

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ransom M, Oaxaca R (2005) Sex differences in pay in a “new monopsony” model of the labor market. IZA Discussion Paper no 1870. IZA, Bonn

  • Reis H (1988) Die Lohndifferenzen zwischen Männern und Frauen in der Schweiz. Peter Lang, Bern

  • Riley H, McGinn KL (2002) When does gender matter in negotiation? John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Faculty Research Working Paper no 36, Harvard

  • Säve-Söderbergh J (2006) Are women asking for low wages? An empirical analysis of individual wage bargaining and ability signaling. Stockholm University Working Paper, Stockholm

  • Solnick SJ (2001) Gender differences in the ultimatum game. Econ Inq 39(2):189–200

    Google Scholar 

  • Sousa-Poza A, Sousa-Poza AA (2000) Taking another look at the gender/job-satisfaction paradox. Kyklos 53(2):135–152

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sousa-Poza A, Sousa-Poza AA (2003) Gender differences in job satisfaction in Great Britain, 1991–2000: permanent or transitory? Appl Econ Lett 10(11):691–694

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stanley TD, Jarrell SB (1998) Gender wage discrimination bias? A meta-regression analysis. J Hum Resour 33(4):947–973

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stevenson B, Wolfers J (2007) The paradox of declining female happiness. Mimeo, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania

  • Stuhlmacher AF, Walters AE (1999) Gender differences in negotiation outcome: a meta-analysis. Pers Psychol 52(3):653–677

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stutzer A (2004) The role of income aspirations in individual happiness. J Econ Behav Org 54(1):89–109

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stutzer A, Lalive R (2004) The role of social work norms in job searching and subjective well-being. J Eur Econ Assoc 2(4):696–719

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wade ME (2001) Women and salary negotiation: the costs of self-advocacy. Psychol Women Q 25(1):65–76

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Webb S (1891) The alleged differences in the wages paid to men and to women for similar work. Econ J 1(4):635–662

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Weichselbaumer D, Winter-Ebmer R (2005) A meta-analysis of the international gender wage gap. J Econ Surv 19(3):479–511

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to two anonymous referees, George Akerlof, Bruno S. Frey, Ed Glaeser, Lorenz Götte, Andreas Kuhn, Audrey Light, Simon Lüchinger, Stephan Meier, Tuomas Pekkarinen, Dina Pomeranz, Betsey Stevenson, Josef Zweimüller, and participants at the 1st International Panel User Conference in Switzerland, EALE, the IZA Workshop on “The Nature of Discrimination”, the Annual Meeting of the German Economic Association, the Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association, the Annual Congress of the Swiss Society of Economics and Statistics, the Annual Meeting of the European Public Choice Society, and the research seminar at the University of Würzburg for helpful comments and to Andreas Herzog for the use of mapresso. This study has been realized using the data collected by the Swiss Household-Panel, a project financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation Program, SPP, “Switzerland Towards the Future” (grant no. 5004-53205).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Lausanne, Extranef, CH-1015, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Rafael Lalive

  2. Department of Business and Economics, University of Basel, Peter Merian-Weg 6, CH-4002, Basel, Switzerland

    Alois Stutzer

Authors
  1. Rafael Lalive
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Alois Stutzer
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Rafael Lalive.

Additional information

Responsible editor: James Albrecht

Appendix

Appendix

Table 6 Approval of equal rights and wages, Switzerland 1999–2003, dependent variable: log (hourly wage rate)
Full size table
Table 7 Approval of equal rights and life satisfaction, Switzerland 2000–2001, dependent variable: satisfaction with life
Full size table

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Lalive, R., Stutzer, A. Approval of equal rights and gender differences in well-being. J Popul Econ 23, 933–962 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-009-0257-4

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-009-0257-4

Keywords

JEL Classification

Search

Navigation