Perceived Gender Fairness, Perceived Social Mobility, and Life Satisfaction Among South Korean Wage Workers: Cross-Sectional Evidence from a Moderated Mediation Model

This study examines cross-sectional relations among perceived gender fairness, perceived social mobility, and life satisfaction in 4381 South Korean wage workers from the 2024 Social Integration Survey. Drawing on equity theory, the prospect of upward mobility hypothesis, and relative deprivation theory, I estimate a moderated mediation model in which perceived social mobility mediates between perceived gender fairness and life satisfaction, with gender as a first-stage moderator. Three observations emerge. First, the indirect statistical association between perceived gender fairness and life satisfaction via perceived social mobility is reliable (ab = 0.051, 95% CI [0.038, 0.066]). Second, the slope of perceived social mobility on perceived gender fairness is descriptively steeper for women (B = 0.219) than for men (B = 0.131), with the moderated mediation index reliably non-zero (Index = 0.026, 95% CI [0.007, 0.048]). Third, exploratory subgroup analyses indicate that the gender-conditional pattern is statistically reliable in the 20–39 subgroup but not in the 40+ subgroup, although the formal three-way interaction is not statistically significant. Given the directional ambiguity of the single-item fairness measure, the present design cannot adjudicate among alternative readings of the gender-conditional pattern. I treat all findings as descriptive patterns of statistical association in this sample.