Quality of work and job satisfaction: comparing female part-time work in four European countries

ABSTRACT

Adding to the debate on the integrative or marginalizing nature of female part-time work, this article provides a comparative analysis of the implications of female part-time work for different intrinsic job quality dimensions and job satisfaction. Drawing on national micro-data from Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden, our multivariate analyses show cross-national similarities in terms of lower job learning opportunities for female part-timers. We found a significantly higher incidence of repetitiveness only among Swedish female part-timers and lower degrees of task discretion among British, Dutch, and Swedish women working part-time hours. Female part-timers were either equally satisfied with their work as female full-timers or even more satisfied. This held true also after accounting for the lower intrinsic job quality of part-time work. While women working part-time hours were as affected by their job quality characteristics as were full-timers, we conclude that the shorter hours of work per se provide an important additional source of job satisfaction.

KEYWORDS:

• Part-time work
• job quality
• job satisfaction
• country comparisons
• Europe

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Duncan Gallie CBE FBA is an Emeritus Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford and Professor of Sociology in the University of Oxford. He has advised the French government as a member of an expert group on psychosocial risks at work. He was a member of the EU Advisory Group on ‘Social Sciences and Humanities in the European Research Area’ for the Sixth Framework Programme. He served as Vice-President Social Sciences (2004–2006) and then as Foreign Secretary and Vice-President of the British Academy (2006–2011).

Michael Gebel is Professor of Sociology, especially Methods of Empirical Social Research at the University of Bamberg. His current research interests comprise transitions to adulthood, youth unemployment and temporary employment, international comparative research and quantitative methods. His work has been published among other in the journals European Sociological Review, Social Forces, and Work, Employment & Society.

Johannes Giesecke is Professor of Empirical Social Research at Humboldt-University Berlin. His current research interests comprise labour market inequalities, international comparative research and quantitative methods. His work has been published among other in the journals Research in European Sociological Review, Social Stratification and Mobility, and Social Forces.

Karin Halldén is researcher at the Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI) at Stockholm University. Her area of research includes gender differences in labour market careers and working lives with a special focus on international comparisons. Her work has been published among other in Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, Work & Occupations, and the British Journal of Sociology. She is currently associate editor of Social Politics.

Peter H. Van der Meer is assistant professor at the Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He is interested in gender differences, the relation between education and the labour market and happiness research. In recent work he investigated what makes workers happy and why men are more affected by unemployment than women.

Rudi Wielers is associate professor at the Department of Sociology/ICS at the University of Groningen. His research interest is in the effects of growing affluence, flexible employment relationships and changing gender relationships on the work ethic, the work hour preferences and the labour supply. His research focuses on the determinants and effects of the growth of part-time work in the Netherlands and other western countries.

Notes

1. It should though be noted that the working hour categories used in this study consisted of both male and female workers (i.e., part-time was not interacted with gender).

2. Occupational segregation measures are sensitive to the degree of detail of the occupational classification system used. Given data constraints, Bardasi and Gornick (2008) collapsed occupations into only three broad categories, leading to an estimation of occupational segregation in which, in contrast to our own analyses based on a more detailed two digit ISCO classification of occupations containing 26 occupational categories, Sweden stood out as having a particularly low level of segregation. To test the robustness of our findings we also used another segregation index, i.e., the A Index (Charles and Grusky 1995). These results too placed Sweden in the top as the country with the highest degree of occupational segregation by female working time status. Nevertheless, the Netherlands was ranked as the country with the lowest degree of segregation, with Germany and UK falling in-between.

3. For Sweden we also run robustness analyses merging regular and marginal part-timers since the marginal part-time category is very small. The findings of these analyses are similar to the once reported.

4. We exclude the former East Germany from our analyses due to persisting differences between the former East and West Germany.

5. The ‘transformative industries’ consist of the NACE categories A (agriculture, forestry, fishing), B (mining and quarrying), C (manufacturing), D (electricity etc.), E (water supply etc.), and F (construction). The ‘consumer industries’ include the NACE categories G (wholesale and retail trade etc.), H (transport and storage), I (accommodation and food service activities), and J (information and communication). The ‘financial sector’ comprises the NACE categories K (financial and insurance activities), L (real estate activities), M (professional, scientific and technical activities), and N (administrative and supportive service activities). The ‘welfare sector’ includes the NACE categories O (public administration and defence, compulsory social security), P (education), and Q (human health and social work activities). The ‘other’ comprises of the NACE categories R (arts, entertainment and recreation), S (other service activities), T (activities of households as employers etc.), and U (activities of extraterritorial organisations etc.).

6. There was also a significant negative coefficient for all categories of British female part-timers taking the contrast between those who had a great deal of influence over how they did the task and others.

7. For the sake of parsimonious models, we estimated Model 4 without interaction terms between intrinsic job quality and working hours. As expected, sensitivity analyses confirm that the results do not change significantly if the interaction terms from model 3 are included (not shown).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the EQUALSOC Network of Excellence funded by the European Union’s Sixth Framework Programme.