The Part-Time Pay Penalty for Women in Britain

By Alan Manning, Barbara Petrongolo. Social Science Research Network, 2008

390 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Women in Britain who work part-time have, on average, hourly earnings about 25% less than that of women working full-time. This gap has widened greatly over the past 30 years. This paper tries to explain this part-time pay penalty. It shows that a sizeable part of the penalty can be explained by the differing characteristics of FT and PT women. Inclusion of standard demographics halves the estimate of the pay penalty. But inclusion of occupation makes the pay penalty very small, suggesting that almost the entire unexplained gap is due to occupational segregation. The rise in the pay penalty over time is partly a result of a rise in occupational segregation and partly the general rise in wage inequality. Policies to reduce the pay penalty have had little effect and it is likely that it will not change much unless better jobs can be made available on a part-time basis.

Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1ad9405ed000d9a3eff7256044d7db3f1c520804

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Citations in the corpus

Female Labor Supply: Why is the US Falling Behind? (2013, background): “…part-time work, several studies have found a significant and large part-time wage penalty across a variety of countries (Bardasi and Gornick 2008; Manning and Petrongolo 2008; Matteazzi, Pailhé and Solaz 2012).11 In addition to having a much higher incidence of full-time work than women in…”
Competition and Gender Prejudice: Are Discriminatory Employers Doomed to Fail? (2009, positive): “This is a disadvantage as part-time work is especially prominent among females and there is evidence that part of the gender wage gap is due to women working in part-time jobs (Manning and Petrongolo, 2008).”
The Unpaid Care Work–Paid Work Connection (2008, neutral): “For instance one recent study on women’s wages in Britain finds that women who work part time earn about 25 per cent less than that of women working full-time (Manning and Petrangolo, 2007).”
Job Satisfaction and Family Happiness: The Part-Time Work Puzzle (2008, neutral): “This is in contrast to the results found for Britain by Main (1988), Ermisch and Wright (1992) and Manning and Petrongolo (2007).”
Flexible employment, economic insecurity and social policy preferences in Europe (2010, background): “With respect to poverty risk, however, part-time workers likely have earning profiles closer to subsistence and to have lower access to job-related income than do full-time workers – together spurring subjective and objective risks of income insecurity or poverty (European Commission, 2004; Gregory,”
MOVING D OWN: WOMEN'S P ART-TIME W ORK A ND OCCUPATIONAL C HANGE I N B RITAIN 1991-2001* (2008, neutral): “The detailed information on qualifications from the LFS can be mapped across academic and vocational qualifications into a ranked scale, following McIntosh (2006), Conlon (2001), Dearden et al.”