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Occupational Standing over the Life Course: What Is the Role of Part Time Work?

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Negotiating the Life Course

Part of the book series: Life Course Research and Social Policies ((LCRS,volume 1))

Abstract

Although part time employment allows women to meet their caring responsibilities and earn income from paid employment, it stalls careers. This chapter examines Australian women’s experiences of occupational change in relation to transitions between part time and full time employment using 4 waves of data from the Negotiating the Life Course project. It shows, consistent with the findings of recent United Kingdom studies, that careers are stalled by the need to move into lower ranked occupations to secure part time hours and family friendly work. Occupational down-grading is less likely to occur if a woman can reduce her hours of employment without changing employer. Women who return to full time employment after a period of part time employment can regain their former occupational standing, although the continued need for family-friendly employment is an impediment. People find it difficult to reduce their hours of employment and remain with the same employer, and even more difficult to reduce hours and stay in the same job. In 2010 Australia introduced a workplace procedure for employee requests to change working time arrangements for parents of children under school age or children under 18 with a disability. Although this is a step in the right direction, the findings of this chapter remind us that conversion to part time hours in a family unfriendly job may impede women’s careers.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This is likely to be an underestimate based on the findings of analyses of returning to work after maternity leave undertaken by Houston and Marks (2003), which showed that this group of mothers may be given less responsibility in the same job. Furthermore, around half the women in part time employment interviewed by Grant et al. (2005) felt they were working below their potential.

  2. 2.

    There are instances when the respondent might have worked in more than four occupations over her working life. In calculating “best occupation” this is a concern for less than ten percent of the women.

  3. 3.

    See Breusch (2003) for a description of the weighting process.

  4. 4.

    The paid work career is assumed to commence when a woman spends 1 year in paid employment that does not coincide with full time study. Years of part time and full time employment are assumed to accumulate from this point, thus excluding part time employment associated with full time education from the measure of part time experience. Although a relatively new phenomenon, recent figures show that over 70% of women aged 15–24 working part time cite education as their reason for working on a part time basis. In contrast almost 60% of women aged 25–44 cited caring for children as their reason for working part time (Abhayaratna et al. 2008: 78).

  5. 5.

    Change in employer is not directly reported in the data set. A woman is assumed to have changed employer if her reported tenure in her current job is less than the elapsed time since she was last employed.

  6. 6.

    For each child born a year is subtracted to account for absences associated with maternity leave.

  7. 7.

    http://www.fairworkaust.com/

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

    Jenny Chalmers

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  1. Jenny Chalmers
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Correspondence to Jenny Chalmers .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Australian Demographic & Social, Research Institute, Australian National University, Canberra, 0200, Aust Capital Terr, Australia

    Ann Evans

  2. School of Social Science, University of Queensland, St. Lucia, 4072, Queensland, Australia

    Janeen Baxter

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Chalmers, J. (2013). Occupational Standing over the Life Course: What Is the Role of Part Time Work?. In: Evans, A., Baxter, J. (eds) Negotiating the Life Course. Life Course Research and Social Policies, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8912-0_11

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