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Part-Time Work, Gender and Job Satisfaction: Evidence from a Developing Country

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 46; Issue: 9 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00220388.2010.492864

1743-9140

Florencia López Boo, Lucía Madrigal, Carmen Pagés,

Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics

Abstract Abstract This paper investigates the relationship between part-time work and job satisfaction in Honduras. In contrast to previous work for developed countries, this paper does not find higher job satisfaction among women working part-time. Instead, for both women and men, job satisfaction is higher when in full-time work, although this finding is stronger for men. Consistent with an interpretation of working part-time as luxury consumption, the paper finds that partnered women with children, poor women or women working in the informal sector are more likely to report higher job satisfaction when working full-time than single women, partnered women without children, non-poor women or women working in the formal sector. Acknowledgements The authors are grateful to Andrew Clark for extremely valuable comments, seminar participants at the 2008 LACEA conference and also two anonymous referees for their very useful comments. This paper represents the opinions of the authors and not those of the Inter-American Development Bank or The World Bank and their board of directors. Notes 1. Previous job satisfaction studies frequently include hours of work as a control, which typically have a negative effect on job satisfaction (Clark and Oswald, 1994 Clark, A. and Oswald, A. 1994. Unhappiness and unemployment. Economic Journal, 104(424): 648–569. [Google Scholar]; Clark, 1997 Clark, A. 1997. Job satisfaction and gender: why are women so happy at work?. Labour Economics, 4(4): 341–372. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; Sousa-Poza and Sousa-Poza, 2003 Sousa-Poza, A. and Souza-Poza, A. 2003. Gender differences in job satisfaction in Great Britain, 1991–2000: permanent or transitory?. Applied Economic Letters, 10(11): 691–694. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Van Praag and Ferrer-i-Carbonell, 2004 Van Praag, B. and Ferrer-i-Carbonell, A. 2004. Happiness Quantified, Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]; Clark and Senik, 2006 Clark, A. and Senik, C. 2006. The (unexpected) structure of 'rents' in the French and British labour markets. Journal of Socio-Economics, 35(2): 180–196. [Google Scholar]). Related work on subjective wellbeing for Latin America is, however, not focused on employment decisions (Graham and Felton, 2006 Graham, C. and Felton, A. 2006. Inequality and happiness: insights from Latin America. Journal of Economic Inequality, 4(1): 107–122. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; Graham, 2008 Graham, C. 2008. Measuring Quality of Life in Latin America: What Happiness Research Can (and Cannot) Contribute. RES Working Papers 4598. 2008. Inter-American Development Bank, Research Department. [Google Scholar]). 2. Given the lack of panel data in Latin America, it is difficult to assess whether this increase in part-time work is due to (i) an inflow of new entrants taking part-time work or rather (ii) full-timers increasingly taking up part-time jobs over time. Evidence suggests (as shown in Figure 2) that increases of participation have been associated with increases in part-time jobs, providing some support for the first hypothesis. 3. Labour force participation and fertility data from World Bank Group, Gender Statistics available at: http://ddp-ext.worldbank.org/ext/DDPQQ/member.do?method=getMembers&userid=1&queryId=182. Honduras particularly has made impressive gains in its contraceptive prevalence rate (CPR), with an increase in use of all methods from 41 per cent in 1987 to 65 per cent in 2005. More recently, overall CPR raised slightly from 62 per cent in 2001 to 65 per cent in 2005. However, there are still indications that there are inequities in access to family planning services across socioeconomic segments of the Honduran population (IDB, 2008). 4. IDB (2008) available at http:// www.iadb.org/sociometro 5. We define partnered as those individuals who are married or have a regular life partner. 6. The analysis of job satisfaction for different groups of the population turns out to be relevant for different academic and policy issues. For instance Freeman (1978 Freeman, R. 1978. Job satisfaction as an economic variable. American Economic Review, 68(2): 135–141. [Google Scholar]), McEvoy and Cascio (1985 McEvoy, G. M. and Cascio, W. F. 1985. Strategies for reducing employee turnover: a meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 70(2): 342–353. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), and Akerlof et al. (1988 Akerlof, G., Rose, R. and Yellen, J. 1988. Job switching and job satisfaction in the US labor market. Brookings Papers on Economics Activity, 2: 495–582. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) all find that job satisfaction predicts future quits, while Clegg (1983 Clegg, C. W. 1983. Psychology of employee lateness, absence, and turnover: a methodological critique and an empirical study. Journal of Applied Psychology, 68(1): 88–101. [Google Scholar]) and Mangione and Quinn (1975 Mangione, T. and Quinn, R. 1975. Job satisfaction, counterproductive behavior, and drug use at work. Journal of Applied Psychology, 60(1): 114–116. [Google Scholar]) show that job satisfaction responses are correlated with absenteeism (negatively) and worker productivity (positively) respectively. The understanding of workers subjective wellbeing thus provides elements to better understand labour market behaviour. This setting clearly relies on satisfaction data being comparable across individuals. See more on this discussion in Clark (1997 Clark, A. 1997. Job satisfaction and gender: why are women so happy at work?. Labour Economics, 4(4): 341–372. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). 7. We tried alternative definitions of part-time such as less than 40 or less than 35, all of which gave the same results. 8. See Hakim (1997 Hakim, C. 1997. "A sociological perspective on part-time work". In Between Equalization and Marginalization: Women Working Part-time in Europe and the United States, Edited by: Blossfeld, H.-P. and Hakim, C. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]). 9. Equivalent to US$86 per month using the average of 2007 exchange rate. 10. Individual valuations of these aspects, namely health, education and other public services are included in the QoL survey for Honduras. 11. We also tried an even lower level of disaggregation from the census data, the hamlet (caserio/barrio), and results remain unaltered. 12. We also investigated the availability of nurseries, but only found six. From those, five of which are located in the capital, Tegucigalpa (http://www.paginasamarillas.com/guarderias-y-jardines-infantiles/honduras/2_1_7_20670_1/index.aspx). 13. It is important to note that for 10 out of 14 countries in the European Union (EU) women display higher overall job satisfaction than men; however, in countries like Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands no significant gender job satisfaction differences are found and in Portugal there is actually a negative gender difference effect (Kaiser, 2005 Kaiser, L. 2007. Gender-job satisfaction differences across Europe: an indicator for labor market modernization. International Journal of Manpower, 28(1): 75–94. [Google Scholar]). Besides, in nine countries, women with a supervisory job position do not differ significantly in their job satisfaction compared to their male counterparts in the EU. An interesting finding in the EU (Kaiser, 2007 Kaiser, L. 2007. Gender-job satisfaction differences across Europe: an indicator for labor market modernization. International Journal of Manpower, 28(1): 75–94. [Google Scholar]) is the general negative impact of temporary jobs on job satisfaction which is detected in 12 out of 14 countries. 14. The basic equation includes: a female dummy, age, age squared, an urban/rural dummy, three education levels dummies (primary completed, high school completed and university completed) and a health index. Equations that included occupation and industries dummies, tenure and marital status did not change the above reported results. We left tenure and marital status out of the final version of the regressions, because the tenure variable had many missing variables and the marital status was used in a previous version of the paper as an instrument in the instrumental variable regressions (but not any more as per the reviewer suggestions). 15. Connelly and Gregory (2008 Connelly, S. and Gregory, M. 2008. Feature: the price of reconciliation: part-time work, families and women's satisfaction. Economic Journal, 118(526): F1–F7. [Google Scholar]) show that in the United Kingdom between 14 and 25 per cent of women who move from full-time to part-time jobs experience occupational downgrading. A similar pattern may be present in Honduras, although part of the difference in the skill content of jobs may be directly attributed to differences in education attainment. 16. Results from estimating a Mincer equation (that controls for selection into employment) with a female dummy, a part-time dummy and part-time dummy interacted with a female dummy confirm these results and are available upon request. In this regression we obtained significant coefficients for the three variables (equal to −0.4, 0.5 and 0.1, respectively) even after controlling for occupation, industry, firm size, job category and individual characteristics. 17. Given that the sample may have oversampled women working at home, we re-examined differences among women working in full- and part-time jobs when excluding women working at home. The results are very similar to the ones presented here except that when excluding this group, women working part-time are no longer more likely to be employed in manufacturing than those in full-time jobs (see Table A1 in the Appendix). We do not restrict the sample further than this; however we did try some restrictions to the sample. First, we kept only the married or partnered individuals where the female partner was aged 25 to 50, as in Booth and van Ours (2008 Booth, A. and van Ours, J. 2008. Job satisfaction and family happiness: the part-time work puzzle. Economic Journal, 118(526): F77–F99. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Second, given the issues with our data, we also tried keeping only those women working outside the home. Results remain unchanged for all these sub-samples. 19. When instead of labour income we include the subjective variable well remunerated alone, we also find clear gender differentials, evidence that this subjective variable captures earnings quite accurately. 20. Reported marginal effects throughout the results section of this paper are always the sum of coefficients of the relevant interactions. 21. We define labour market participation as being either in employment or unemployed, with the latter defined as people without a job but who have searched for a job during the week of reference. As a matter of comparison, in the UK, the corresponding figures for the 16–64 cohorts are 67 per cent of women and 86 per cent of men are active. 22. The correlation between the participation equation and the selection equation is positive, which implies positive selection bias in women's satisfaction. This finding suggests that the job satisfaction distribution observed for paid women is higher than would be found for comparable women workers who choose not to participate in the labour market. 23. Excluding women working at home does not change the results. 24. We split by number of children as well and results did not change. 25. The authors find that even if labour force participation rates of mothers in Austria and Germany are similar, full-time employment rates are much higher among Austrian mothers. 26. The number of observations in this table is lower as the information on per capita household income was not available for the full sample of workers. However, results remain unchanged when running all specifications in Tables 3 to Table 5 on this smaller sample. 27. Flexibility as an inherent characteristic of informality could be found in many papers such as Maloney (2004 Maloney, W. F. 2004. Informality revisited. World Development, 32(7): 1159–1178. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) and Perry et al. (2007 Perry, G., Maloney, W., Arias, O., Fajnzylber, P., Mason, A. and Saavedra-Chanduvi, J. 2007. Informality: Exit and Exclusion, Washington, DC: World Bank Latin American and Caribbean Studies. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), among others. 28. The same is true for men, with 75 per cent of men working part-time being informal by our definition. 29. There are 77 aldeas in our sample. We also run this specification using unemployment and self-employment at the higher level of aggregation of department (there are 16 departamentos in our sample: Atlantida, Colon, Comayagua, Colon, Cortes, Choluteca, El Paraiso, Francisco Morazan, Intibuca, La Paz, Lempira, Ocotepeque, Olancho, Santa Barbara, Valle and Yoro). 30. We are referring to the standard rule of thumb (Stock and Yogo) of an F stat in the first stage greater than 10. We found that being in a high unemployment or self-employment municipio was significantly (at 95% level) and negatively correlated with having a part-time job – both for males and females (not reported).