From corporate manager to office worker...from teacher to classroom assistant....from nurse to care assistant. These are occupational trajectories for some of Britain’s most highly qualified women when they switch to part-time work and childcare. This loss of career status with part-time work is a stark failure among otherwise encouraging trends for women’s advancement.
Girls and young women are outperforming their male counterparts at all educational levels - primary school, GCSE, A-levels and higher education; a substantial majority of university students are now women. They are moving into an expanding range of occupations, such as financial services, and building successful careers in them. The gender pay gap continues to narrow. But for many women all this comes to an abrupt halt when childcare claims part of the working week.
Hidden brain drain
Six million women, over 40 percent of those in work, are in part-time jobs; this includes the majority of Britain’s mothers. For part-timers the pay gap has been widening steadily over a number of years, relative to men and to women in full-time work. This is because part-time jobs are heavily polarised into low-paid occupations.
But many women in these jobs are qualified for, and have previously held, higher level, better paid jobs. The Equal Opportunities Commission has called this the ‘hidden brain drain’ of women’s part-time work. This occupational downgrading is described in our research, recently published in The Economic Journal.
Worst affected are women managers. One in three women corporate managers move down the occupational ladder when they switch to part-time work; two-thirds take clerical positions and the rest a range of other lower-skill jobs. Managers of shops, salons and restaurants are even worse affected, almost half giving up their managerial responsibilities to become sales assistants, hairdressers and similar. Teaching and nursing are the most favourable careers in supporting moves to part-time work while continuing in the profession, although even there almost one in ten quit for lower-skill jobs.
Among women from other professional occupations over one in five downgrades. The underutilisation of women’s education and skills implied by this are disturbing. Almost half of women professionals who downgrade move into jobs where the average employee lacks even A-levels; this means that three, four or even more years of high level education and training are underutilised. The reason for this occupational downgrading is not that mothers want less demanding jobs, but that part-time opportunities in higher-level jobs are restricted.
Permanent pay penalty
A mother’s best chance of avoiding downgrading is to be able to negotiate a switch to reduced hours with her current employer. Good part-time opportunities rarely become available on the open market. Occupational downgrading brings a serious pay penalty. Part-time jobs in lower-level occupations are typically poorly paid and give no pay progression. Worse, women get no pay credit for time spent in these jobs once they return to a full-time career path. Worse again, where the downgrading leaves women at a permanently lower occupational level the pay penalty is permanent; even five years in a downgraded part-time job followed by five years back on a full-time basis leave her earnings 40 percent less than if she had continued in her previous full-time professional job. This pay gap continues to widen over the remainder of her working life.
Press coverage of these research findings was extensive and mostly fair. It provoked active blogging, sometimes sympathetic
"after 3rd level education and a good career with great salary, I'm now a full-time housewife and mother, not by choice but by lack of opportunity and cost of childcare. It does make me wonder why I went to college in the first place..."
"thanks very much for the interview. You certainly had our (male) technical engineer cheering for the cause of more flexible working for mums."
but often hostile, from women as much as men:
"if someone has a child they have to accept some of the baggage that goes with that..."
"this government has pandered too much to parents"
"children are a choice and if you have them you must accept the consequences"
"if you have chosen to have children you should not expect to having a flash career too. Women these days want it all."
Don't accept inequity
Our view is that the ‘one-and-a-half breadwinner’ model is not doing well by the more highly qualified among Britain’s mothers. With education and up-skilling national priorities and work-life balance high on the political agenda this is a major challenge to policy-makers. Unequal treatment of part-time workers is unlawful, but neither equal pay not equal opportunities addresses occupational downgrading. The recently introduced right to request flexible working is having very limited impact. At present the low quality of many part-time jobs means that women are paying the price of reconciling work and family. We should no longer accept the inequity and social efficiency of low-level part-time jobs for mothers as the means of reconciling work and family.
Press coverage and some blogs are at:
http://www.newstatesman.com/200803190024 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=519989&in_page_id=1770 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/27/worklifebalance http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/02/27/nwork227.xml http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7265734.stm
Dr Mary Gregory is at the Oxford University. Dr Sara Connolly is at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. Moving Down: Women’s Part-time Work and Occupational Change in Britain 1991-2001 was published in the February edition of The Economic Journal.
Is this your experience or have you been able to stay at the same grade while working part-time? Email mandy@workingmums.co.uk
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