Subjective well-being (SWB) serves as an important measure of development and social progress. There has been considerable progress in achieving gender parity in individual outcomes across various domains of life, including education, economics, and health. As individual SWB is impacted by contextual factors such as objective conditions, it is important to examine whether this progress towards “objective equality” has resulted in an increase in gender equality in SWB. Using data from 8 rounds (2006-2020) of the European Social Survey across 36 different countries, this study aims to investigate the relationship between societal gender equality, which is measured by the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index (GGI), and the gender gap in subjective well-being. To this end, we employ a two-stage empirical strategy. In the first stage, we use the Oaxaca-Blinder method to decompose the gender gap in subjective well-being in each country/survey year into two parts: a part that is explained by gender differences in observable characteristics and a part that remains unexplained. In the second stage, we explore the relationship between the unexplained part of the gender gap and our societal gender equality measure (GGI). The estimation results indicate that there is no statistically significant association between GGI and the unexplained part of the gender gap in subjective well-being. This finding is robust to several sensitivity checks.
Date of Award | 26 Oct 2023 |
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Original language | English |
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Awarding Institution | - Universidade Católica Portuguesa
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Supervisor | Zahide Eylem Gevrek (Supervisor) |
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- Gender happiness gap
- Gender inequality
- Subjective well-being
- Mestrado em Economia Empresarial
What explains cross-country differences in the gender happiness gap?: does gender inequality matter?
Costa, G. J. S. P. D. (Student). 26 Oct 2023
Student thesis: Master's Thesis