Job Satisfaction within the Scottish Academic Profession
37 Pages Posted: 26 Nov 1999
Date Written: April 1999
Abstract
This paper considers job satisfaction in the academic labor market drawing upon a particularly detailed data set of 900 academics from five traditional Scottish Universities. Recent studies have revealed that in the labor force as a whole women generally express themselves as more satisfied with their jobs than men. Our results show that reports of overall job satisfaction do not vary widely by gender. This result is explained through the nature of our dataset, limited as it is to a highly educated workforce, in which female workers are likely to have job expectations comparable to their male counterparts. Ordered probit analysis is used to analyze the determinants of an academic's overall satisfaction at work as well as satisfaction with promotion prospects, job security and salary. Comparison salary is found to be an important influence on academics' overall job satisfaction, although evidence suggests that academics place a lower emphasis on pecuniary relative to non-pecuniary aspects of work than other sectors of the workforce.
JEL Classification: J44
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