Deeltijds werkende vrouwen: gezinsvorming, keuze en context

Young women's part-time work: family formation, choice and context
Ilse Laurijssen
Research Group TOR
Department of Sociology
Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium)

In recent decades, women's labour market participation has risen substantially. This trend coincides with the gradual progress girls have made in educational attainment, with young women now surpassing men. However, participation rates are not equally high among all women. In Belgium, female participation rates are particularly high among university graduates, but rather low among women with poor educational qualifications. While highly qualified young women seem to have caught up with men in the labour market, the labour market positions of men and women are still very different among the less educated. In this paper we focus on the factors that are associated with differential participation patterns, and especially the larger gender gap among lowly educated young people.
Family-related responsibilities are prominent in explanations of gendered labour market positions. Research findings illustrate that female employment is affected by family composition. Especially the presence of young children is an important source of gender differences. Parenthood reduces the labour market participation of women, not men, and particularly among lower educated women. Most of these research conclusions are inferred from cross-section analyses. Other studies focus on the timing of reentering the labour market after childbirth. These conclude that higher educated women retreat less often and for shorter durations. Highly educated women also seem to postpone family formation, in order to first establish their labour market careers. This pattern is also obvious among young people: particularly lower educated women start with family formation earlier, and have their first child at a younger age than higher educated women.
Economic and sociological theories propose different explanations for the relation between family responsibilities and labour market participation. Economists emphasize the choices made by the individual actor, whereas sociological perspectives focus on cultural and structural factors that constrain individual choice. In the debate the lower labour market participation of women is being linked with stronger family orientations and limited labour market attachment (particularly in Hakim's interpretation of human capital theory). Discussion is still open with regard to the causal role of these orientations or preferences. Do women work part-time because they value family more and thus give priority to the family domain over their working career? Or do women work less because of the difficulty of combining the family duties with a full-time job, or maybe because the occupational position offers few opportunities, and consequently they adjust their attitudes? With these alternative interpretations, researchers have pleaded for longitudinal research of orientations and occupational careers, in which attitudes and behaviour of women can be compared both before and after having children.
Using the longitudinal SONAR dataset of Flemish youth, we analyze the participation rate, part-time work and full-time work among young women over time. We first look at the labour market position of mothers before their transition to parenthood, in order to evaluate the causal effect of family formation. Indeed, young mothers work full-time less often than young women without children. This observation suggests that women reduce their labour market participation in response to the demands of childcare. However, our longitudinal analyses also reveal that mothers in part-time positions often already worked part-time before their first childbirth. This seems to support the alternative interpretation which connects the lower female participation with stronger family orientations and weaker labour market attachment. In the second part of the paper, we evaluate both hypotheses by focusing on the meaning and context in which part-time work among young women occurs, particularly among non-mothers. More specifically we examine the motives for working part-time, the satisfaction with the number of working hours, the link with general job motivation, and with expectations about future work and family formation.