Gender Gap In Job Utility Of British Workers

The gender gap in attaining a university qualification has gradually narrowed in Britain and this has motivated the evaluation of gender differences in non-pecuniary returns of education. Therefore, this paper explores the trends in job utility of workers, measured by subjective self-evaluation of satisfaction scores from work. The data shows that while female workers experience higher job utility compared to men during the survey period, male workers are reporting higher utility in recent years, resulting in narrowing gender gap in job utility. Logistic regression models are used to understand the factors contributing to this gender gap. The results suggest that education is unlikely to contribute to this trend whereas unemployment has a small contribution to the emerging pattern. Furthermore, the results show that job utility of male workers is more cyclically sensitive compared to female workers as stalling unemployment during an economic downturn affects men more than women.