Social Structure and the Paradox of the Contented Female Worker: How Occupational Gender Segregation Biases Justice Perceptions of Wages
研究解释了为何女性通常认为自己的工资比男性更公正，尽管她们知道收入更低。通过分析德国面板数据，发现这一悖论仅存在于女性占多数的职业中，而在男性主导的职业中消失，表明性别差异源于职业结构而非个体感知差异。
This article provides a structural explanation for the paradox of the contented female worker. Although they are generally aware that they earn less than men, women usually perceive their wages as more just. This article argues that men and women do not differ in how they perceive their wages, yet the gendered segregation of the labor market will constrain the availability of preferred same-gender referent standards in some occupations. Random- and fixed-effects analyses of longitudinal data of the German Socio-Economic Panel covering the years 2009 to 2015 ( N = 26,362) reveal that the paradox is only detectable in occupations with a considerable number of female referents. However, as soon as women move into a male-dominated occupation, the paradox vanishes. These results contradict the view that men and women generally differ in how they perceive their wages and indicate that gender differences in justice perceptions can be explained by the structural embeddedness of employees in certain occupations.