Flexible time – but is the time owned? Family friendly and family unfriendly work arrangements, occupational gender composition and wages: a test of the mother-friendly job hypothesis in Sweden

ABSTRACT

The relationship between gender, working conditions, occupational gender composition and wages is investigated to test the support for the mother-friendly job hypothesis in the family-friendly welfare state of Sweden. The Swedish level-of-living survey (LNU2010) is used to measure two dimensions of working conditions: flexibility and time-consuming work. The findings do not support the notion that women’s work is more family-friendly as neither women in general nor mothers have more flexibility than men. Furthermore, femaledominated occupations have, in comparison with other occupations, less flexible work arrangements. Instead, gender-integrated occupations have the most flexible work arrangement. Time-consuming work is also most common in gender integrated occupations. Flexibility and timeconsuming work largely go hand in hand and are both positively associated with wages and also more common in the service class. Finally, women are not economically compensated for their job characteristics in the same extent as men, especially not for their time-consuming work which partially account for the gender wage gap. Taken together the findings counters the notion that the remaining gender wage gap largely is due to women avoiding time consuming work or choosing flexibility. Instead it seems like women are compensated less regardless of their job characteristics.

RÉSUMÉ

La relation entre genre, conditions de travail, composition professionnelle par genre et salaires est explorée. La dernière vague de l'Étude suédoise sur les conditions de vie (LNU2010) est utilisée afin de mesurer deux dimensions se référant aux conditions de travail, la flexibilité et le travail chronophage. Les résultats ne corroborent pas l'hypothèse selon laquelle le travail des femmes serait plus compatible avec la famille, dans la mesure où ni les femmes en général, ni les mères n'ont plus de flexibilité dans leur travail que les hommes. De plus, les professions à prédominance féminine ont, en comparaison avec d'autres professions, des conditions de travail moins flexibles. En revanche, les professions à prédominance mixte présentent les conditions de travail les plus flexibles. Flexibilité et travail dit chronophage vont en grande partie de pair et sont tous deux associés positivement aux salaires, et sont aussi plus répandus dans les services. Enfin, les femmes ne sont pas rémunérées pour les caractéristiques de leur travail au même niveau que les hommes, et c'est plus précisément le cas lorsque qu'elles ont un travail dit chronophage, ce qui explique partiellement les écarts de salaires entre hommes et femmes.

KEYWORDS:

• Flexible work
• wages
• gender-wage gap
• occupational gender composition
• working conditions
• mother-friendly jobs

MOTS-CLÉS:

• Temps flexible
• salaire
• écart de salaire entre les hommes et les femmes
• composition professionnelle par genre
• conditions de travail

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Goldin (2014) does not refer to these requirements as time-consuming working conditions. She instead shows that flexible schedules and flexible work arrangements have a negative effect on wages. However, she defines flexible working conditions such as not being able to work long hours and not being able to work at particular moments.

Workplace flexibility is a complicated, multidimensional concept. The term incorporates the number of hours to be worked and the particular hours worked, being ‘on call,’ providing ‘face time,’ being around for clients, group meetings, and similar. Because these idiosyncratic temporal demands are generally more important for the highly educated workers  … . (Goldin, 2014, p. 1094)

Thus, Goldin’s (2014) definition of workplace flexibility has similarities with the definition of time-consuming working conditions (Magnusson, 2010).

2 According to Mood (2010), there are major problems with comparing odds ratios across models and groups. To overcome this problem, the analyses are performed with LPM using robust standard errors to minimize heteroscedasticity problems.

3 Analyses including part-time work in this index have also been done. However, the correlations between part-time work and the other indicators of flexibility are low. Among those who could postpone their job task, could perform errands and had no fixed work time, there were only 19 individuals who worked part-time. Moreover, in Sweden, all parents are entitled to reduce their working time when having young children regardless of workplace or occupational arrangement. Part-time work can therefore not be considered a characteristic of a particular occupation or working condition, because employers cannot deny an employee with young children permission to reduce their working time (See also Grönlund & Öun, 2018). Because women are over-represented as part-time workers (Statistics Sweden, 2014), part-time work is important to consider when analyzing wage differences between men and women. Part-time work is thus not included in the combined measurement of flexibility but as a control variable.

4 Based on the question: ‘Apart from the competence necessary to get a job such as yours, how long does it take to learn to do the job reasonably well?’ (response categories: 1 day or less, 2–5 days, 1–4 weeks, 1–3 months, 3 months–1 year, 1–2 years, and more than 2 years). The response alternatives have been recoded into number of months.

5 Based on the question: About how many years of education above elementary school are necessary?

6 The relationship between flexible working conditions and occupational gender composition has also been tested with a linear variable that indicated that access to flexible working conditions increases as the number of women in the occupation increases. A squared term of percentage of women in the occupation also was included in these additional tests, showing that the positive effect of percentage of women decreases when occupations become highly feminized. Thus, these tests point in the same direction as the result presented here.

Additional information

Funding

For financial support, I gratefully acknowledge the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet, VR) [grant number 2013–1690] and Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare (Forte) [grant number 2016-00661].

Notes on contributors

Charlotta Magnusson

Charlotta Magnusson is an associate professor of sociology at the Swedish Institute for Social Research, Stockholm University, Sweden. Her current research focuses on gender stratification in the labour market; in particular wage, occupational prestige and working conditions. Her work has recently been published in Acta Sociologica, British Journal of Sociology, and Work, Employment and Society.