the latter phenomenon has important implications as the process or the likelihood of reducing the discrepancies between ones aspirations and outcomes may itself be more relevant to wellbeing than the level of said discrepancies for instance the socalled paradox of contented female workers agassi describes a situation where because of different aspirations and in particular lower emphasis being placed on earnings in comparison to men although women in general are aware of the gender wage gap they do not report significantly greater dissatisfaction with their job and consequently their subjective wellbeing crosby lalive and stutzer davidson first we start by investigating the relationship at the macrolevel by focusing on crosscountry variation model