Part-Week Work by Married Women

Abstract

Voluntary part-week work, defined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as employment at a job having regularly scheduled hours of 34 or less, accounts for about one-fourth (24.0 percent) of the jobs now held by women 18 years of age and over.' The number of jobs which are part-week is even greater (33 to 35 percent) for mature women who are married with spouse present [14]. Part-week work has accounted for over one-third of the well-documented growth in the employment of women during recent years.2 Additional statistics are required to confirm that part-week work is important in the labor market picture for women. Despite its importance, however, part-week work has received little attention from economists. Convincing evidence of this neglect can be found in the usual practice in most labor force participation studies of classifying persons as either working or not in the labor force. Thus, part-week workers are lumped together with full-week workers. In contrast, Gramm [7] specifically distinguishes three labor status alternatives (no work, part-time work, and full-time work), but her analysis is restricted to wives in the teaching profession. A distinction between full-time and part-time work is also made in parts of the study by Cain [5], yet in other places he aggregates part-time workers with the unemployed. Aside from these studies, little empirical evidence exists on the factors influencing the part-week work choice of wives. In reality, the decision to work part-week may differ from the full-week work choice. For example, the presence of children or of health problems may constitute less of a barrier to employment in part-week jobs than in jobs of longer hours. In this paper we examine the part-week work choice of mature married women. Emphasis is placed upon married women because recent research by Mincer and Polachek [19] has stressed the need for more continuous labor market attachment by this group if their earnings are to improve relative to men. Part-week work may offer a means of avoiding la-