Part-time employment as a way to increase women’s employment: (Where) does it work?

Part-time employment has repeatedly been proposed as a solution for integrating women into the labor market; however, empirical evidence supporting a causal link is mixed. In this text, we investigate the extent to which increasing part-time employment is a valid means of augmenting women’s labor market participation. We pay particular attention to the institutional context and the related characteristics of part-time employment in European countries to test the conditions under which this solution is a viable option. The results reveal that part-time employment may strengthen female employment in Continental Europe and especially in Southern Europe, where an increase in part-time employment—even if it is demand-side driven—leads to greater employment participation among women. We also discuss some policy implications and trade-offs: Although part-time work can lead to higher numbers of employed women, it does so at the cost of increasing gendered labor market segregation. We analyze data from the European Labor Force Survey (EU-LFS) 1992–2011 for 19 countries and 188 regions and exploit regional variation over time while controlling for time-constant regional characteristics, time-varying regional labor market features, and (time-varying) confounding factors at the national level.