Full-Time and Part-Time Work and the Gender Wage Gap
- PDF / 505,970 Bytes
- 14 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 58 Downloads / 157 Views
Full-Time and Part-Time Work and the Gender Wage Gap Luiza Antonie 1 & Laura Gatto 1
& Miana
Plesca 1
# International Atlantic Economic Society 2020
Abstract Using hourly and weekly wages from the Canadian Labour Force Survey from 2000 until 2018, workers were separated into full-time and part-time and the following striking observation was documented. The overall gender wage gap is larger than either the full-time pay gap or the part-time pay gap, even after controlling for detailed personal and job characteristics. This result is a consequence of two findings: (i) part-time wages are lower than full-time wages, and (ii) the majority of part-time workers are women. In aggregation, this brings down the average female wage, leading to a larger aggregate gender wage gap. This was further linked to a differential selection by gender into full-time and part-time work, with women of higher earnings potential being overrepresented in the pool of part-time workers, resulting in no gender pay gap in the part-time worker category. Policies targeted at encouraging full-time employment for women should therefore reduce the gender wage gap. Keywords Full-time . Part-time . Gender wage gap JEL Codes J31 . J16
Introduction The persisting gender wage gap has been thoroughly documented in the literature. The focus in this literature has been almost exclusively on full-time full-year workers, perhaps reflecting the fact that the gender wage gap among part-time workers is negligible.1 The focus on full-time full-year workers has masked the following striking observation: that the 1
Statistics Canada’s definition of part-time as less than 30 hours of work per week. At the suggestion of a referee, sensitivity analyse using 35 hours per week as the part-time cut-off were conducted. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11293-02009677-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
* Laura Gatto [email protected]
1
University of Guelph, Guelph, Canada
Antonie L. et al.
overall gender wage gap is much larger than both the full-time and part-time pay gaps, even after controlling for detailed personal and job characteristics. Using data from the Canadian Labour Force Survey (LFS) (Statistics Canada, 2019), all workers were separated into fulltime and part-time work channels and a raw gender wage gap of about 20% among full-time workers was documented, as well as a negligible but negative gender wage gap among parttime workers, with females earning slightly more than males in the part-time group. In aggregation, the overall gender wage gap is about 30%, which is larger than the gap for either full-time or part-time groups. This finding is linked to a differential selection by gender into full-time and part-time work, with women widely outnumbering men in the pool of low-paid part-time workers. Of all male workers in the labour market, only 5.8% work parttime, compared to 20.5% of females working part-time. Moreover, the average weekly parttime
Data Loading...
