Do women prefer female bosses?

The participation of women in the labor force has grown significantly over the past 50 years, and with this, women are increasingly holding managerial and supervisory positions. Yet little is known about how female supervisors impact employee well-being. Using two distinct datasets of US workers, we provide previously undocumented evidence that women are less satisfied with their jobs when they have a female boss. Male job satisfaction, by contrast, is unaffected. Crucially our study is able to control for individual worker fixed effects and to identify the impact of a change in supervisor gender on worker well-being without other alterations in the worker's job.