Part-time employment-boon to women but bane to men? New insights on employer-provided training part-time employment

Abstract

Although previous literature has found substantial differences between female and male workers in almost all labor market outcomes, the question of whether training participation differs between female and male part-time workers has been neglected. This article provides a novel examination of whether the part-time training gap is gender-dependent. Using a Swiss dataset, we find that men engaged in part-time employment suffer from a serious training disadvantage in comparison to men working full-time and that this effect is not found for women. Thus, in countries where part-time participation levels differ significantly between men and women, part-time employment is a “bane” to men but not to women. Women, however, “pay the price” merely by virtue of being female.