Abstract
Using hourly and weekly wages from the Canadian Labour Force Survey from 2000 until 2018, workers were separated into full-time and part-time and the following striking observation was documented. The overall gender wage gap is larger than either the full-time pay gap or the part-time pay gap, even after controlling for detailed personal and job characteristics. This result is a consequence of two findings: (i) part-time wages are lower than full-time wages, and (ii) the majority of part-time workers are women. In aggregation, this brings down the average female wage, leading to a larger aggregate gender wage gap. This was further linked to a differential selection by gender into full-time and part-time work, with women of higher earnings potential being overrepresented in the pool of part-time workers, resulting in no gender pay gap in the part-time worker category. Policies targeted at encouraging full-time employment for women should therefore reduce the gender wage gap.
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Notes
Statistics Canada’s definition of part-time as less than 30 hours of work per week. At the suggestion of a referee, sensitivity analyse using 35 hours per week as the part-time cut-off were conducted.
Higher education can result in increased female labour force participation for the relatively more educated groups, affecting positively the gender wage gap (Olivetti and Petrongolo, 2008). The selection out-of-the-labour-force of lower educated women can explain differences in the magnitude of the gender wage gap across European countries.
An even larger differential between the overall gender gap and the FT and PT gaps can be documented on annual incomes using census data. The census analysis is not reported here because the frequency of data is different, and the LFS has a richer set of characteristics that can be used in the analysis.
With the addition of workers with 30 to 35 hours per week of work, the part-time group becomes slightly larger for both men and women. The group working 30 to 35 hours has average earnings above the group working less than 30 hours, and below those of the group working more than 35 hours. As such, when the group working between 30 to 35 hours is moved from the full-time definition to the part-time definition, mean wages become higher in the new part-time group which gains higher earners, and they also become higher in the new full-time group which loses lower earners. We thank an anonymous referee for suggesting this sensitivity analysis.
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Antonie, L., Gatto, L. & Plesca, M. Full-Time and Part-Time Work and the Gender Wage Gap. Atl Econ J 48, 313–326 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11293-020-09677-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11293-020-09677-z