Lack of flexibility in working hours for women

Giaccone, Mario

Overview

Article

Lack of flexibility in working hours for women

Published: 20 February 2005

Mario Giaccone

Gender equality

The 2003 Cnel [1] labour market report was presented in Rome in November 2004. It shows weak labour market growth, with a largely stagnant participation rate. Women are still the main contributors to growth: of the 225,000 newly employed workers, 141,000 are women, almost totally concentrated in services and retail.[1] http://www.cnel.it/

A 2003 labour market report shows that female participation in the labour market grew rapidly in the 1990s, despite a lack of flexibility in traditional working time arrangements and childcare services. Women are, therefore, forced into part-time work in order to manage their double workload. Self-employment and entrepreneurship offer flexibility but bring greater responsibilities.

The 2003 Cnel labour market report was presented in Rome in November 2004. It shows weak labour market growth, with a largely stagnant participation rate. Women are still the main contributors to growth: of the 225,000 newly employed workers, 141,000 are women, almost totally concentrated in services and retail.

This gender breakdown is consistent with employment growth in the 1990s, of which women represented 80% from 1993 to 2003, according to Istat (in Italian), the Italian Institute of Statistics. This increase is overwhelmingly concentrated (95%) in jobs with a working time of less than 35 hours a week. However, only 53.6% of this growth can be attributed to an actual part-time contract. In 1999, working time in the public sector was reduced from 36 hours to 35 hours a week, while full-time teachers (most of whom are women) work 20 hours a week. In addition, a significant percentage of women are economically dependent workers (IT0501NU01) who do not have a standard employment contract. In other words, women work fewer hours because they tend to choose jobs with lower weekly hours. Thus, gender differences in terms of occupation are perpetuated.

**Table 1 Women employed, per working hours**
Women employed, per working hours
	1993		2003		1993-2003
	Average per 1,000	%	Average per 1,000	%	Average per 1,000	%
From 1 to 20 hours	629	12.9	979	16.3	350	30.5
21-30 hours	645	13.2	1,036	17.2	291	34.1
31-35 hours	119	2.4	462	7.7	343	29.9
36-40 hours	2,998	61.5	3,034	50.4	36	3.1
More than 40 hours	485	9.9	511	8.5	26	2.3
Total women employed	4,876	100.0	6,023	100.0	1,147	100.0
Women employed part time	570	11.7	1,185	19.7	615	53.6

Source: Istat quarterly Labour Force Survey (LFS)

Reasons for working part time

Analysing the motivations of women who work part time gives an insight into the problems they face (Table 2). The proportion of women choosing to work part time is stable at just over 30%, while the percentage of part-timers seeking full-time work shows a decline. The proportion seeking part-time work as the only alternative to a (temporary) exit from the labour market has now increased to 42.5%.

**Table 2 Motivations of women working part time**
Motivations of women working part time
	1993		2003
	Average per 1,000	%	Average per 1,000	%
Cannot work full-time (necessity)	294	37.1	615	42.5
Do not desire a full-time job (choice)	253	31.9	440	30.4
Did not find a full-time job	245	30.9	392	27.1
Total women employed part time	792	100.0	1,447	100.0

Source: Istat quarterly LFS

Company measures

Research conducted by the Fondazione Seveso (Ponzellini and Tempia, 2003, IT0306204F- EIRO, 2003) included a wide - although incomplete - assessment of family friendly arrangements at company level. They detected 310 such arrangements in 250 company agreements from the CNEL collective agreement database. However, only 11% are childcare related services, while career supports play a negligible role (1.9%). The offer of insurance and benefits (17.7%) is usually based on traditional company schemes, but there are some innovative cases, such as refunding home care costs incurred while travelling away on business.

Most of the measures concern working time and teleworking arrangements (69.4%), as shown in more detail in Table 3 below. Paid or unpaid leave, part-time work and job sharing are the most common arrangements, while time-flexibility management (on a daily or annual basis) accounts for just 25% - despite the fact that time accounts were introduced into most national labour contracts from 1999. Teleworking amounts to less than 6%. Companies express a clear preference for the most simple and least expensive working time arrangements, avoiding organisational restructuring and a shift towards a results-based supervision system.

**Table 3 Types of measures on working time and teleworking**
Working time and teleworking measures
	Average	%
Paid or unpaid leave	79	36.7
Part-time work and job sharing	67	31.2
Flexibility in daily start/end time	28	13.0
Flexibility on an annual basis, time account	27	12.6
Teleworking	12	5.6
Exempt from Sundays and night shifts	2	0.9
Total	215	100.0

Source: Fondazione Seveso, 2003

Cultural barriers remain

The 2003 Cnel labour market report finds that women have changed their attitude towards work, but still face cultural inertia in organisations. Employers offer few opportunities for flexible working time arrangements, and the offer of care services is modest. For instance, only 7% of small children of three years or under are in childcare, while the target set by the Barcelona Summit is 30%. Some 55% of working mothers leave their children with grandparents, according to the 2003 Istat-Cnel report on Maternity and female participation in the labour market: constraints and conciliation strategies (in Italian).

Company inflexibility may be at least partly due to the Mediterranean welfare state model, where the male breadwinner is still the reference worker for employers and the welfare system. Increasing care service demands can be sidestepped by availing of the ‘intense network of informal aids and intergenerational solidarity’ (Istat, 2004 - in Italian). Women are no longer likely to leave the labour market when they become mothers, but they are encouraged either to seek part-time jobs, resulting in reduced career prospects and gender segregation, or to consider self-employment and entrepreneurship, bringing heavier workloads and responsibilities.

Reference

Ponzellini, A. and Tempia, A., Quando il lavoro è amico. Aziende e famiglie: un incontro possibile , Roma: Lavoro, 2003.

Further EU level research is available on the Foundation’s website concerning [gender in the workplace](/search/node/ewco OR employment OR gender?oldIndex).

Eurofound recommends citing this publication in the following way.

Eurofound (2005), Lack of flexibility in working hours for women, article.