Part time jobs, fragmentation and work instability: light on the gender gap in Emilia-Romagna

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to evaluate if, given personal, supply-related features, and labour demand-related variables, there is a difference in the share of women finding more stable jobs with respect to men, in an eight-year time span. Design/methodology/approach – Fragmentation leads to a lower probability of transitioning into more certain, full-time work positions. The authors analyse a rich cohort of dependent workers in Emilia-Romagna to investigate whether part-time jobs lead to full-time jobs in a “stepping-stone” fashion and whether this happens with the same probability for men and women. The focus is on the cost of part-time jobs rather than the contrast between permanent and temporary jobs, as often observed in the literature. The authors also evaluate the transition between part-time job formulae and open-ended work arrangements to determine whether women’s transition to full-fledged, stable work positions is slightly rarer than their male counterparts. Even if the authors allow for the fact that part-time contracts can be a choice and not an obligation, these contracts generate more flexibility in managing the equilibrium between private and work life and create more uncertainty than full-time contracts because of the fragmentation associated with these arrangements. Findings – The authors find that women have a more fragmented working career than men, in that they hold more contracts than men in the same time span; moreover, the authors find that part-time jobs act more as bottlenecks for women than for men. Originality/value – The authors use a large administrative dataset with over 600,000 workers observed in the 2008–2015 time span, in Emilia Romagna, Italy. The authors can disentangle the number of contracts per worker and observe individual, anonymise personal features, that the authors consider in the authors’ propensity score estimate. The authors ran a robustness check of the PSM estimates through coarsened exact matching (CEM).