Gender and nonstandard work hours in 12 European countries

Monthly Labor Review

Volumn 131, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 83-103

  Presser, Harriet B ^a   Gornick, Janet C ^b   Parashar, Sangeeta ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND   (United States)

^b CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 42949093711     PISSN: 00981818     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (42)

1. See Biological Rhythms: Implications for the Worker, publication OTA-BA-463 (U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, 1991);
2. Henrik Bøggild and Anders Knutsson, "Shift Work, Risk Factors, and Cardiovascular Disease," Scandinavian Journal of Work and Environmental Health, vol. 25, no. 2, 1999, pp. 85-99;
3. and Alexander Wedderburn (ed.), "Shiftwork and Health," special issue of the Bulletin of European Studies on Time (BEST), vol. 1 (Luxembourg, Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 2000), on the Internet at www.eurofound.ie, Web site of the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (visited Feb. 25, 2008).
4. Donald I. Tepas and Jana M. Price, "What Is Stress and What Is Fatigue?" in Peter A. Hancock and Paula A. Desmond (eds.), Stress, Workload, and Fatigue (Mahwah, NJ, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001).
5. Timo Kauppinen, The 24-Hour Society and Industrial Relations Strategies (Oslo, Norway, European Industrial Relations Association, 2001).
6. It is interesting that, in the United States, the term is "nonstandard" or "atypical" hours, whereas Europeans researchers frequently say "unsocial" hours. (See, for example, Jill Rubery, Mark Smith, and Colette Fagan, "National Working-Time Regimes and Equal Opportunities," Feminist Eronomics, March 1998, pp. 71-101.)
7. Harriet B. Presser, Working in a 24/7 Economy: Challenges for American Families (New York, Russell Sage Foundation, 2003).
8. Presser's research suggests that the increased tendency toward marital instability does not result from spouses in troubled marriages seeking nonstandard hours; rather, the causality seems to run the other way.
9. Wen-Jui Han, "Maternal Nonstandard Work Schedules and Child Cognitive Outcomes," Child Development, January-February 2005, pp. 137-54.
10. Jody Heymann, The Widening Gap: Why America's Working Families Are in Jeoparay - and What Can Be Done About It (New York, Basic Books, 2001);
11. Presser, Working in a 24/7 Economy.
12. Heymann, The Widening Gap.
13. Ibid.
14. Wen-Jui Han and Jane Waldfogel, "Maternal Nonstandard Work Schedules and Adolescents' Socio-Emotional Well-being," paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Population Association of America, Philadelphia, Mar. 31-Apr. 2, 2005.
15. See, for example, Janet C. Gornick, "Gender Equality in the Labor Market," in Diane Sainsbury (ed.), Gender Policy Regimes and Welfare States (Oxford, U.K., Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 210-42;
16. Janet C. Gornick and Marcia K. Meyers, Families That Work: Polities for Reconciling Parenthood and Employment (New York, Russell Sage Foundation, 2003 (paperback, 2005));
17. and Rubery, Smith, and Fagan, "National Working-Time Regimes" and Women's Employment in Europe: Trends and Prospects (London and New York, Routledge, 1999).
18. Harriet B. Presser and Janet C. Gornick, "The female share of weekend employment: a study of 16 countries," Monthly Labor Review, August 2005, pp. 41-53.
19. Presser, Working in a 24/7 Economy.
20. The Fair Labor Standards Act deals with minimum-wage and overtime compensation when individuals work more than 40 hours a week, but it does not explicitly treat the work shifts of adults.
21. Presser, Working in a 24/7 Economy.
22. Ibid.
23. All of the European countries in this article, except for Norway, are members of the European, Union. Four Union countries - Germany, Greece, Portugal, and Spain - are omitted due to unavailable data or problems in comparability with work schedule questions. Note that Norway voluntarily implements European Union directives.
24. For reasons of confidentiality, Eurostat would not provide the precise unweighted sample sizes for each of these countries after the subsample for analysis was selected.
25. The restriction of the sample to wage and salary earners is based on an interest in examining workers who are subject to employer demands and have less control over working at nonstandard times than the self-employed have. Also, in the labor force surveys, questions about shift work were asked only of wage and salary earners. Restricting the sample to nonagricultural workers excludes those working in agricultural industries or in agricultural occupations. Excluding these workers minimizes measurement error because it is difficult to measure their work hours.
26. Denmark does not specifically identify evening and night work hours in its survey, "but if the work period is mostly placed in the evening it is defined as evening work and if it takes place in the typical sleeping hours it is defined as night work" (Lone Solbjerghoj and Lars Peter Smed Christensen, personal communications, Dec. 14, 2003, and Feb. 20, 2006, respectively).
27. If such workers usually work evenings or nights, they are included in the nonday category.
28. This definition differs from that used by Presser in Working in a 24/ 7 Economy, in that it does not specify how much of the total hours worked is worked during nonstandard times. Whereas the U.S. survey asks respondents when they worked the most hours the previous week, the European labor force surveys include persons who usually work some, but not necessarily most, of their hours at nonstandard times.
29. Presser and Gornick,"'Ihe female share of weekend employment."
30. See, for example, Gosta Esping-Anderson, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1990);
31. and Gornick and Meyers, Families that Work.
32. For ease of comparison, we adopt this country ordering in all of the charts. That is, the countries are ordered first by region and, within region, by declining levels of nonday employment.
33. The low level for Sweden may be a consequence of a new survey filtering pattern employed by that country since 2003 (as reported by Gunborg Johansson, the Swedish delegate to Eurostat, September 6, 2006). The new pattern led to a substantial drop in the percentage reporting that they usually worked weekends, compared with previous years'percentages.
34. For a 1997 analysis of separate Saturday and Sunday employment, with a focus on women's share of such employment in the continental countries, see Presser and Gornick, "'Ilie female share of weekend employment."
35. Presser, Working in a 24/7 Economy.
36. In Finland, Norway, and Sweden, the results among women are driven mostly by their greater likelihood (relative to men) of working rotating shifts, rather than evenings and nights in themselves. (Results are not shown.)
37. In the subsequent analyses of economic sectors, the labor force survey variable "industrial sector - main job" is used. This variable is variously coded as "agriculture," "industry," and "services" in the data set employed in this article. The agriculture sector was excluded from the study, and nonstandard-hour work in the and sector is contrasted here with nonstandard-hour work in the industry sector. It is important to emphasize that this analysis employs an industrial classification, not an occupational classification. Although many of these service-sector workers work in service occupations, an occupational distinction is not what is captureld here.
38. Ten of the countries had the option "hours vary" in their surveys, and the range of responses in this category was from 1 percent to 6 percept. These cases were treated as missing in the analysis of full-time workers.
39. Tables 1-4 report unexponentiated betas, meaning that they indicate the effect (negative or positive) of being a woman on the logarithm of the odds of being employed nondays (or weekends). A negative coefficient indicates that women are less likely to work these nonstandard hours; a positive coefficient means that women are more likely to work such hours.
40. A model also was examined that considered the socioeconomic characteristics listed, absent marital status, followed by a model that added marital status. The aim was to see if marital status would substantially affect the gender coefficients. That turned out not to be the case for any of the countries in the analysis.
41. Furthermore, in these data, if adults report that they have no children at home, it is not possible to distinguish those who never had children from those whose children have grown up and left home. When the sample is limited to adults under age 45, the likelihood that the childless adults in the sample have never had children increases dramatically. In other words, it is then easier to distinguish between parents and nonparents.
42. Presser, Working in a 24/7 Economy.