Connolly/Gregory: Moving Down: Women’s Part-time Work and Occupational Change in Britain 1991–2001

[mothwing]

Look, Crocky - a study:

Moving Down: Women’s Part-time Work and Occupational Change in Britain 1991–2001, by Sara Connolly, Mary Gregory.

They found that women who change to a part time job - those being mostly mothers during childcare years - from their full-time job usually end up with a job far below their level of skill and of training. That does not happen because mothers want easier  jobs to be able to concentrate on their children, but because so little part-time opportunities exist in interdemediate and upper levels and they are thus forced out of those jobs. So most women in part-time jobs are wasting their training and knowledge on low-status, low-reward, low-skill jobs, which is snappily called a "hidden brain-drain".

They conclude:

Part-time work is an important form of employment, predominantly for women. The flexibility of hours which it offers has facilitated employment amongst women of all ages, most importantly by allowing them to combine work with responsibilities in the home. However, part-time jobs are disproportionately concentrated into low-skill, low wage sectors, often with a strong female presence. Given women’s rapidly rising levels of educational attainment, and their outperformance of young men in more recent cohorts, it is clear that a substantial number of women in part-time work must be overqualified for the jobs they are doing. This paper examines occupational change among women switching to part-time employment.

We have based the analysis on two very different datasets, the NESPD and the BHPS. Although the numerical incidence of some of the changes we examine differs, sometimes quite noticeably, between them, the differences are consistent with known biases in the NESPD and the vulnerability of BHPS to small samples in this context. More importantly, in spite of their differing basis, scale and sampling methodology, the thrust of the results from the two is closely comparable on all the aspects examined. We have therefore been able to treat them as complementary, capitalising on the size of NESPD to give robust lower bound estimates of the incidence of changes associated with part-time work, and on the rich content of BHPS to open up further avenues. The incidence of occupational downgrading is substantial. At least 14 percent, and probably around one-quarter of women switching to part-time work move to an occupation where the average qualification level is below that of her previous full-time job. Downgrading affects as many as 29 percent of women from professional and corporate management jobs, and up to 40 percent in jobs at intermediate skill level. While some professional women take the opportunity of the switch to part-time work to move into a new career requiring a high level of skills, in one of associate professions occupations or corporate management, at least as many take up jobs in a range of lowskill occupations, as care assistants, or in clerical or sales jobs, underutilising between three and five years of higher education and professional training (even more for the most highly qualified). The most frequent ‘victims’ of downgrading, willing or otherwise, are women in smaller-scale managerial positions, in restaurants, salons and shops, almost half of whom shed their managerial and supervisory responsibilities and revert to being standard personal service or sales assistants.

In sharp contrast with the decision to switch to part-time work, made by women in all occupations, the incidence of downgrading is affected to only a relatively small extent by personal or household characteristics, such as labour market experience, educational attainment or the presence of children. A pre-school child adds only 3-5 percentage points to the 35 percent risk of downgrading faced by the mother when she leaves her current employer for a new part-time job, and this is largely reversed when the child reaches primary school. By contrast, the risk of downgrading is strongly influenced by the (lack of) part-time opportunities within her current occupation. This indicates that the demand by employers for part-time workers in different occupations is of central importance in determining the risk of downgrading. This is further confirmed by the finding that, across a wide range of occupations, downgrading is greatly reduced for women who cut their working  hours while remaining with their current employer (although some survey evidence questions whether these part-time positions are truly on a par with their full-time counterparts, even when nominally the same job; see Houston and Marks, 2003). This analysis of downgrading, focused on women moving directly to part-time work while remaining in continuous employment, is the rosier part of the picture. Not discussed here are the downgrading experiences of women who take breaks from employment and then return to part-time work. Among them the incidence of downgrading is at least doubled. 

Assessing the underutilisation of qualifications with downgrading shows some pathways to be less socially inefficient than others. A nurse becoming a carer is likely to experience a pay cut of the same order as her colleagues who become sales assistants; the impact on personal earnings and on GDP can be identical. But as a carer she continues touse occupation-specific skills, even if at a lower level, maintaining a social return to elements of her training and perhaps facilitating a future return to nursing. The issue of social efficiency applies widely where, as with nurses and graduates generally, the investment in skills is publicly provided.

At a time when national education and training strategies are focused on extending educational participation and enhancing skills training the underutilisation of the skills of women working part-time is wasteful and inappropriate. The key to curbing downgrading is the greater availability of opportunities for part-time work within women’s existing jobs. That this can be effective is shown by the experience of nursing and teaching where 89 percent of women who move to part-time work remain within the profession. The structural reasons for the availability of part-time jobs in these occupations are obvious: the 24/7 basis for nursing care, in teaching the need for sickness cover and fractional provision. The question arises why similar considerations are not equally persuasive over a much wider range of public and private sector services at the professional, managerial and higher skill levels. Noting that nursing and teaching are heavily female occupations, are the constraints on the creation of good part-time jobs elsewhere structural, or due to managerial conservatism? The ‘right to request flexible working’ introduced in 2003 makes a start in the appropriate direction but is restricted in scope (only parents of children  under six) and allows employers wide scope for refusal. Strengthening this right is a very feasible step towards reducing the ‘hidden brain drain’ of the skills of women in part-time work.

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Rather alarming, especially considering how unlikely it is that there will be greater flexibility any time soon - apart from in the social sector.