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Work Values and Job Preferences in Europe: Gender Aspect

Natalia Soboleva (LCSR Higher School of Economics)

Keywords: Comparative research

Abstract

Traditionally, men are considered to be the breadwinners, while women’s main social role concerns taking care of children and the household. However, today the difference between gender roles is becoming less clear. In most of the European countries, childcare institutions and services make the household burden easier, and the traditional life pattern centered on marriage and having kids is more often regarded as only one of the possible alternatives. Women gain wider access to education and labor market. However, despite the fact that women do not have lower education as compared to men they are often less advantaged in making their career. In other words, although women manage to have rather higher level of human capital, they are unable to make full use of it in their professional activity and this hinders economic development. The ground for this lies in structure of their work values and job preferences because they have to take into other spheres of life.

Notwithstanding, passive acceptance of gender equality is not sufficient for changing the situation in the society. Women have to be ready to apply the “gender equality” strategies that they approve. One of such strategies is the achievement motivation that is reflected both in work values and in the assessment of some aspects of their current job.

The study aims to disclose the effect of gender attitudes both on micro- and macrolevel on achievement motivation of men and women. Cross-cultural dataset allows us to disclose both individual and country level predictors of female and male work values and job preferences. The dataset is the fifth wave of European Social Survey because it comprises a battery of questions of work values. Multilevel regression modeling is used.

According to the results, women are less satisfied with different aspects of their jobs and have lower achievement motivation compared to men. Gender attitudes on both individual and country level are positively associated with the achievement motivation. Along with that, the effect of gender attitudes is rather strong for women and absent for men. In the broad context, it indicates that it is mainly the women’s gender roles that are transforming. Men continue regarding the career is very important. This finding is line with explanation that men face more losses than women when they put aside their career (Croft et al. 2015).

On the country level both gender inequality index and mean gender attitudes in a country influence work values and job preferences reflecting achievement motivation. The cross-level interaction has shown that the difference between men and women in work values and job preferences is stronger is countries with the higher level of subjective gender inequality. In the other words, the achievement motivation of women depends upon the general level of gender equality in the country. At the same time, the interaction effect for objective gender equality is insignificant. More broadly, changing gender attitudes in the country has an impact upon female motivation.