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안녕하세요. 고라소니의 영어로 경제보기 코너입니다.

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오늘은 09/05/2019 자 The Economist지의 경제 기사를 살펴볼텐데요.

괜찮은 영어 표현들은 밑줄을 쳐놨고,

특이한 영어 표현은 파란 배경색과 기울임꼴을 적용하였습니다.

또한 어려운 영어 단어들은 노란 배경색을 부여하고 해석을 달아놨습니다.

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Part-time jobs help women stay in paid work

But they can also stop women’s careers from progressing

 

In the rich world part-time working took off in the second half of the 20th century, as services replaced manufacturing and women piled into the labour market. It remains essential to helping women work, particularly after giving birth, and in countries with traditional gender norms. But it can prolong—or even worsen—gender inequality and make women less independent by locking them into jobs with worse pay and prospects. Differences in working hours explain a growing part of the gender pay gap. That share could increase as labour markets disproportionately reward those willing and able to work all hours—who are mostly men.

Almost one in five workers globally are part-time (defined as working fewer than 35 hours a week). In many countries married women are the group most likely to work part-time, and married men the least likely to (see chart 1). In the EU, nearly one in three women in work aged 20-64 are part-time, compared with fewer than one in 12 men (see chart 2).

Family obligations often lead women to choose to work part-time. In America 34% of female part-timers, and just 9% of male ones, cite this as their main reason. In the EU the figures are 44% and 16%. Its availability has been credited with the rapid growth of female participation not just in the Netherlands, but also in Germany, Japan and Spain.

But for women, there is a cost. Within the OECD—apart from in Japan and South Korea, where women are excluded from most well-paid jobs—part-time working and the gender pay gap are significantly correlated. The mix of reasons varies from country to country, but three stand out.

First, in nearly everywhere that has data available, part-time jobs pay less per hour than full-time ones. Sometimes this is within an occupation. But more often it is between occupations: the types of jobs that can readily be done part-time, or are offered part-time, are lower-paid than those that are not.

Second, part-timers are more likely to have a “bad job”—one that offers little training and few legal rights. In America 39% of female part-time workers are in the “secondary” labour market, with low pay, no benefits and few opportunities to move to better jobs, writes Arne Kalleberg of the University of North Carolina in “Precarious Work”.

Third, part-time work can be a trap. Although often a short-term expedient, most women who start to work part-time continue for longer than intended. Many never go full-time again. The share of Dutch women working full-time peaks at age 25-30 and then falls, never to recover—quite unlike the pattern for men, who peak later and then stabilise. A study in Australia found that the likelihood of a woman changing hours, contract or employer fell by 25-35% after she became a mother.

For an employer, the benefit of part-time rather than full-time workers depends on the sector. When demand varies a lot, part-timers bring large productivity gains. Companies where full-time employees work more than 48 hours a week could benefit from more part-timers, since productivity falls off above that threshold. But otherwise the evidence is mixed. In countries with fewer protections for part-timers (the Netherlands and Norway are rare exceptions), companies choose them for that reason.

Indeed, the gender pay gap could even widen further. One reason is growing demand for “flexible” workers, by which employers generally mean the opposite of what workers with caring responsibilities mean: permanently on-call rather than with predictable, mutually agreed hours and the ability to work from home. “I wouldn’t be surprised if this new demand for flexibility creates new types of biases against women,” says Mr. Bassanini. Related to this is the rise of jobs with extremely short hours, mostly done by women.

Yet even modern, family-oriented men face a dilemma. Their requests to work part-time are more likely than women’s to be rejected. And those who do work part-time risk discrimination. A study in which CVs were sent to prospective employers found that men whose CVs showed them as working part-time were just half as likely to get a call-back as those who were identical, except that they were working full-time. Part-time women faced no such discrimination. As long as such double standards exist, many couples will still choose to scale back her career, rather than his.