Self-employment, job attributes and the paradox of the contented female worker

A large literature finds that the self-employed are more satisfied in their jobs.  Interestingly, like in the wage and salary sector, ceteris paribus, self-employed women are found to have more satisfaction in their jobs than self-employed men, even though the gender wage differential is higher for the self-employed.  This paper examines the so-called ‘paradox of the contented female worker’ for both sectors, focusing on the importance of certain job attributes and whether workers actually experience these attributes.  While there is some literature attempting to explain contented female wage and salary workers, there is little in the way of research on the interrelationship of gender and job satisfaction for the self-employed.  Using data from the 2003 National Survey of College Graduates (NSCG) collected by the US National Science Foundation, we examine workers who have at least a bachelor’s degree in the (social or hard) sciences, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) and/or are currently working in a STEM-related field.  Consistent with similar research, our results confirm that in the wage and salary sector, differences in the importance of job attributes do explain the gender satisfaction gap.  However, in self-employment, the gender satisfaction gap is jointly driven by the importance of job attributes and whether the expectations of these job attributes are met or not.  That is, self-employed women are happier than their male counterparts because they are getting more of what they want out of self-employment. Properly controlling for the gap between desiring and actually obtaining these attributes ‘explains’ the gender differential in job satisfaction of the self-employed.