The Paradox of the Contented Female Worker: Why Are Women Satisfied with Lower Pay?

Although women in general are aware of and concerned about the gender wage gap, individual women do not report significantly greater dissatisfaction with their pay, which has been termed “the paradox of the contented female worker” (Crosby 1982). The current study proposes a model of the factors leading to pay satisfaction to explain this paradox based on Major’s (Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 26:293–355, 1994) work on entitlement....