Job Characteristics of Women Employed Less than 20 Hours per Week in the European Union

This paper aims at explaining to what extent women’s secondary part-time jobs have marginalized characteristics. Secondary part-time jobs are defined as jobs of less than 20 hours per week. Four clusters of job characteristics have been examined: characteristics related to wages and job security, the hours of work, working conditions, and workplace characteristics. Statistical analyses were carried out, using the 1996 Second European Survey on Working Conditions, which contains data on 6,802 female workers in 15 EU member states. The women employed less than 20 hours have been compared to the women employed 20 hours or over. The percentages of workers in secondary jobs vary between 2 and 24 percent of the female workforce in the member states. As far as wages and job security is concerned, the analyses show that indeed the women in secondary jobs are marginalized: they are found to be more often receiving no basic fixed income, to be more often temporary employed, to have lower tenure, and to be receiving less training. As far as working conditions is concerned, reverse to our expectations, these are better for women in secondary jobs, and they significantly more often report that to their opinion their health is not at risk because of their work. As far as the hours of work is concerned, the women in secondary jobs are hardly marginalized. They do not work to a larger extent at unsocial hours; they do not work more often in jobs that have rigid time schedules, though they more often work shifts. Finally, substantial support was found for the thesis that women in secondary jobs are clustered into femaledominated areas of work: they are far more often working in female-dominated occupations, in femaledominated businesses, and they are far more likely to have a female boss. Company size does not matter, but women in secondary jobs are employed in the public sector to a lesser extent.