Why Women End Up in Part-Time Jobs: The Global Perspective

Across the world’s most developed economies, a curious pattern has hardened over the last four decades. As more women joined the paid workforce, the jobs waiting for them were often not full positions but fragments – shifts, hours, and roles labelled “part-time.” Today, women fill the overwhelming majority of these positions, raising uncomfortable questions about whether the rise of part-time work represents progress, accommodation, or a quieter form of economic exclusion.

The rise of part-time work in industrialized economies 🔗

Since the 1980s, part-time employment has expanded sharply across North America, Western Europe, and parts of East Asia. The shift from manufacturing to services played a major role. Retail, hospitality, healthcare, education, and care work – sectors that dominate post-industrial economies – depend on fluctuating demand, evening shifts, weekend rushes, and seasonal peaks. Splitting jobs into shorter hours allowed employers to match staffing to demand far more tightly than the traditional eight-hour shift permitted.

Governments encouraged the trend. In the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Australia, part-time work was actively promoted from the 1980s onward as a way to lower unemployment and pull more women into the labour market. The result is visible in current data. According to the OECD Family Database, part-time employment rates for women remain dramatically higher than for men across nearly every member country, with the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Germany topping the list.

A workforce that is overwhelmingly female 🔗

The gender composition of part-time work is striking. The International Labour Organization reports that in industrialised countries, between 65 and 90 percent of all part-time workers are women. Germany and Belgium sit at around 90 percent; Italy, Greece, and the United States hover around 65 percent. Globally, the ILO estimates that women account for roughly 57 percent of all part-time workers, despite forming only about half the working-age population.

This is not a marginal trend. In the United States, the National Women’s Law Center notes that nearly six in ten part-time workers are women, and women are about 1.6 times more likely than men to work part-time. The picture is similar in much of Europe, where female-dominated sectors like care work, retail, and clerical services have absorbed the bulk of new part-time jobs.

Why women end up in part-time roles 🔗

The headline answer is care. In almost every country with available data, women perform the majority of unpaid domestic and caregiving work, from cooking and cleaning to looking after children and elderly relatives. When paid work has to be squeezed around these obligations, shorter hours often feel like the only viable option. The ILO’s Global Wage Report finds that in 68 of 73 countries studied, women work part-time more often than men, and this is closely tied to uneven family responsibilities.

But care is only part of the story. Three structural forces push women into part-time roles even when they would prefer full-time work.

Insufficient and unaffordable childcare 🔗

Where public childcare is limited, expensive, or runs on short hours, mothers face an impossible arithmetic. Hiring help often costs more than the second income would bring in. Research compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond shows that countries with comprehensive, full-day childcare – particularly the Nordics – have higher female full-time participation, while countries where care is patchy push women into shorter hours by default.

Occupational segregation 🔗

Women are concentrated in sectors where part-time contracts are the norm rather than the exception. Retail, hospitality, social care, primary teaching, and clerical work were structured around part-time hours long before women entered them in large numbers. As the ILO notes, women’s employment is concentrated in a narrow range of service sectors where job security is minimal and full-time positions are scarcer.

Employer design 🔗

In many low-wage service industries, full-time roles are deliberately rare. Splitting a single full-time job into two or three part-time positions allows employers to avoid overtime pay, dodge thresholds that trigger benefits, and adjust headcount quickly when business slows. For workers in these industries – disproportionately women – part-time work isn’t a personal choice but the only opening available.

Exploitation hidden inside the part-time contract 🔗

The economic costs of part-time work compound over a working life. Even when the job description is identical, part-time workers tend to be paid less per hour than full-timers, receive fewer benefits, and have weaker job security.

Lower wages, even per hour 🔗

It is often assumed that part-time work simply pays proportionally less because the hours are fewer. The reality is harsher. According to the World Economic Forum’s analysis of ILO data, the earnings gap between comparable full-time and part-time work – for the same job, same sector, same skill level – is around 10 percent in favour of full-timers. This “part-time penalty” stacks on top of the broader gender pay gap, which the ILO currently puts at about 20 percent globally, with wider gaps for mothers, informal workers, and migrant women.

Fewer benefits and weaker protections 🔗

Part-time workers in many countries fall below the hour thresholds that unlock health insurance, paid leave, retirement contributions, and unemployment benefits. The National Women’s Law Center documents how part-time workers in the United States are systematically excluded from employer-sponsored health coverage, paid sick days, and retirement plans. Because women cluster in part-time roles, they accumulate smaller pensions, lower social security entitlements, and thinner savings – a pattern that ripples into old-age poverty.

Unstable hours and “just-in-time” scheduling 🔗

A growing share of part-time work in retail and food service runs on algorithm-driven scheduling. Hours are assigned days, sometimes hours, in advance. Shifts are cancelled at the last minute. “On-call” assignments leave workers unable to commit to childcare, classes, or a second job. The National Women’s Law Center describes how these “just-in-time” practices shift all the risk of fluctuating demand onto the worker while reserving every advantage for the employer.

Stalled careers and the motherhood penalty 🔗

Part-time roles rarely lead anywhere. Promotions, training opportunities, and senior positions are concentrated in full-time tracks. A mother who steps into part-time work for a few years often finds herself frozen in pay grade, passed over for advancement, and required to accept lower wages if she later returns to full-time work – the well-documented “motherhood penalty” that contributes substantially to lifelong income gaps.

The myth of flexibility 🔗

The dominant story told about part-time work is that it offers flexibility – a way for women to balance career and family. The reality is more complicated, and considerably less flattering to employers.

Whose flexibility? 🔗

In a genuinely flexible job, the worker controls when and how the work gets done. In most part-time roles, the employer controls the schedule, and the worker adapts. As writers at the World Economic Forum have pointed out, “flexibility” in the part-time labour market is too often code for low-responsibility, low-pay, task-oriented work clustered on the margins of organisations. Framing it as a women’s issue can quietly reinforce the assumption that women’s careers are secondary and that caregiving will always be their primary job.

Involuntary part-time work 🔗

Crucially, a large and growing share of part-time workers would prefer full-time hours and cannot get them. The classic critique of the flexibility narrative argued decades ago that the sharpest rise in part-time work has come from involuntary part-timers – people who want full-time jobs but are offered only fragments. Women dominate this group. Even among those classified as “voluntary” part-timers, many would choose full-time work if affordable childcare or eldercare were available. Official statistics rarely capture this constrained choice.

Why the myth persists 🔗

The flexibility narrative survives because it serves multiple interests at once. Employers can present a cost-cutting strategy as a worker-friendly policy. Governments can claim higher female employment figures without addressing care infrastructure. Households can rationalise an unequal division of labour as a free choice. The cost is borne quietly, in lower wages, smaller pensions, weaker bargaining power, and slower career progress for the millions of women whose work is treated as marginal.

What real flexibility would look like 🔗

None of this means part-time work is inherently bad. Many workers – women and men – genuinely want shorter hours at different points in their lives. The problem is the package that currently comes with it: lower hourly pay, fewer benefits, less stability, and slower advancement. A more honest version of flexibility would include equal hourly pay for comparable work, prorated benefits, predictable schedules, paths to promotion, and the right to switch between full-time and part-time without penalty. Several countries, including the Netherlands and parts of Scandinavia, have moved in this direction with pay parity rules and stronger protections for part-time workers, though gaps persist.

Equally important is the unpaid side of the ledger. Until childcare, eldercare, and household labour are shared more equally – between partners and between families and the state – women will continue to absorb the costs of inadequate care infrastructure through their careers and earnings. The conversation about part-time work, in other words, cannot be separated from the broader conversation about who does the world’s unpaid work.

What do you think? If part-time work were paid at the same hourly rate as full-time work, with full benefits and clear paths to promotion, would the gender composition of these jobs still look the way it does today? And what does it say about an economy when the jobs designed for “flexibility” are also the ones with the least power?

References

1. https://webfs.oecd.org/Els-com/Family_Database/LMF_1_6_Gender_differences_in_employment_outcomes.pdf
2. https://www.ilo.org/resource/news/women-work-more-are-still-paid-less
3. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2019/03/an-economist-explains-why-women-get-paid-less/
4. https://nwlc.org/resource/part-time-workers-factsheet/
5. https://www.ilo.org/media/402181/download
6. https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus/2016/q3-4/feature2
7. https://ilostat.ilo.org/equal-pay-for-work-of-equal-value-where-do-we-stand-in-2023/
8. https://www.ilo.org/resource/news/towards-pay-equity-laws-wages-care-policies-and-social-dialogue-are-key
9. https://nwlc.org/resource/the-part-time-worker-bill-of-rights-act-promoting-fair-treatment-for-part-time-work/
10. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2022/05/the-myth-of-flexibility-for-women-in-the-workplace/
11. https://prospect.org/1992/04/01/flexibility-trap-proliferation-marginal-jobs/