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"Part-Time Work is an Important Driver of the Gender Wage Gap"

This is the conclusion reached by Laila Schmitt and Katrin Auspurg based on a trend study using the Socio-Economic Panel for Western Germany.

24.02.2022

The study is informative because it not only observes the development of wage inequality in Western Germany over a 30-year period, but at the same time identifies important factors for the change in the gender wage gap. It reveals important countervailing effects related to shorter working hours: The expansion of part-time work in recent decades has been accompanied by greater labor force participation of women, which brought more women in the labor market in the first place. At the same time, however, the increasing selection of women into lower-paid part-time jobs has contributed significantly to the fact that the gender wage gap has only narrowed slightly in recent decades. Working hours could to be an important starting point for closing the gender wage gap.

A press release on the article can be found here, the full publication in the European Sociological Review is available here.