The gender gap in self-rated health and education in Spain. A multilevel analysis.

BACKGROUND: Women tend to report poorer self-rated health than men. It is also well established that education has a positive effect on health. However, the issue of how the benefits of education on health differ between men and women has not received enough attention and the few existing studies which do focus on the subject do not draw a clear conclusion. Therefore, this study aims to analyse whether the positive influence of educational attainment on health is higher for women and whether education helps to overcome the gender gap in self-rated health.

METHODS: We analyse cross-sectional data from the 2012 European Union statistics on income and living conditions. We use a logit regression model with odds ratios and a multilevel perspective to carry out a study which includes several individual and contextual control variables. We focused our study on the working population in Spain aged between 25 and 65. The final sample considered is composed of 14,120 subjects: 7,653 men and 6,467 women.

RESULTS: There is a gender gap in self-rated health only for the less educated. This gap is not statistically significant among more highly educated individuals. Attaining a high level of education has the same positive effect on both women's and men's self-rated health.

CONCLUSIONS: Although we did not find gender disparities when considering the effect of education on health, we show that women's health is poorer among the less educated, mainly due to labour precariousness and household conditions.