Part-time and temporary employment: a gender perspective

The focus in this Chapter is on part-time and temporary work, two different types of ‘nonstandard’ work analysed in a gender perspective. The interest in these types of non standard work is justified in terms of their increasing weight with respect to total employment in Italy while the overrepresentation (though at a different extent with a biggest gender gap in part-time employment) of women in these types of jobs and the risks of employment segregation at the disadvantage of women outlined by the literature (Section 1) require a gender perspective. In so doing we will try to disentangle not only the inequalities in the share of non standard work by gender but the gender differences in the determinants and the reasons conducting to the ‘choice’ of non standard employment (Section 3). The literature has outlined the limited share of voluntary temporary workers (Section 1) while a higher share of part-timers state to be so voluntary. Moreover, amongst voluntary part-timers, previous analyses have shown that for women there is a higher share than for men of those part-time workers who state that they are voluntary part-timers because of family reasons. Given the higher percentage of part-timers amongst employed women and the significant share of women assessing that they have chosen part-time work for family reasons we have investigated more in depth in Section 4 the reasons of working part-time in Italy taking into account also the observable probability of being involuntary working part-time. Another crucial issue in the analysis of non standard employment is related to the costs of being in non standard work. The literature has uncovered the costs in terms of lower wages, lower career perspectives and lower training (Section 1). In this Chapter we will analyse the costs in terms of hourly wages, probability of having a supervisory role and we will try to assess also the costs in terms of the development of other significant dimensions of well-being. For this purpose we use the Italian Survey IT SILC (Section 2) belonging to the wider European Statistics on Income and Living Conditions survey programme, a set of data that allows us to recover not only the money costs of different employment positions but also the costs connected to other dimensions of well-being, like the access to health services that we will take into account in Section 5.