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Gender Inequality in Europe and the Life Satisfaction of Working and Non-working Women

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Abstract

Empirical analysis of data drawn from the European Social Survey reveals that—after individual characteristics are controlled for—women engaging in market work and housework have similar life satisfaction levels. Complementing the micro-level data from the survey with country-level variables, namely GDP per capita and gender inequality (measured by the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index, GGGI), we estimate a multilevel regression model to shed light on the contextual factors of the life satisfaction of women in Europe. We find that working women’s well-being relative to housewives is greater in countries where the GGGI indicates a smaller gender gap, i.e. where women are in a better position in terms of equality with men in the public domains. We interpret this finding to mean that the so-called ‘paradox of declining female happiness’ is in part due to persistent gender roles which appear to have a larger impact on the well-being of working women.

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Notes

  1. Housework hours have also been found to be associated with higher levels of stress among women (Glass and Fujimoto 1994; Coltrane 2000; Roxburgh 2004). The division of household labor between men and women has also been shown to be directly and indirectly linked to depression among women (Golding 1990; Larson et al. 1994; Barnett and Shen 1997).

  2. See Heidemeier and Göritz (2013) for a review of the literature on how satisfaction with various life domains relates to overall life satisfaction.

  3. According to framing theory, frames of thought serve individuals as guiding principles, suggesting how they should think about issues and occurrences (Bohman 2014; Goffman 1974).

  4. We are not ruling out the possibility that GDP per capita is in fact reflecting the impact of another economic phenomenon or social norm with which is positively correlated. The investigation of such a variable and the presentation of a theoretical framework that justifies its use could be the theme of a future study.

  5. The data set is available at http://www.europeansocialsurvey.org/data.

  6. As would be expected, the unemployed have lower satisfaction levels than those in other employment states (Clark and Oswald 1994; Winkelmann and Winkelmann 1995; Frey and Stutzer 2000; Diener and Seligman 2004). The magnitude of the impact of unemployment depends on whether one has access to other sources of income, the duration of unemployment, etc.

  7. For our estimations, we used the HLM software, version 6.08, developed by Raudenbush et al. (2004). Due to the prevalence of categorical variables in our model, uncentered values of the predictors were used.

  8. The wording of the survey item inquiring about the presence of the respondent’s own children suggests that the children in question could be of any age.

  9. To observe whether the variation in the effect of engaging in paid work across countries is large enough to motivate an examination of how it might be correlated with macro variables, we estimated our model for the 28 countries in the data separately. We found that the coefficients on paid work range between −0.44 and +1.03 with a standard deviation of 0.34.

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  1. Department of Economics, Istanbul Bilgi University, Silahtar, Eyüp, 34060, Istanbul, Turkey

    Cem Başlevent & Hasan Kirmanoğlu

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  1. Cem Başlevent
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Başlevent, C., Kirmanoğlu, H. Gender Inequality in Europe and the Life Satisfaction of Working and Non-working Women. J Happiness Stud 18, 107–124 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-016-9719-z

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