Part-time jobs are not like tapas: exactly the same as full-time jobs, just in smaller portions. This common misperception was repeated this week in a report by Women Like Us bemoaning the fact that women with young children have to take low-paid jobs beneath their skill levels because of a lack of part-time, professional positions.
It’s true that the tapas analogy works for check-out operators and bus drivers whose hours can be shrunk without it harming their effectiveness. But it does not work for more senior professional and managerial roles.
What Women Like Us and others routinely overlook is that these types of jobs invariably entail unpaid overtime, being on call outside office hours, business travel and entertaining that eats into private life. And working mothers usually go part-time to work not just fewer hours, but fixed hours that childcare can be arranged around. The whole point of being part-time is to avoid having to take out-of-hours responsibility for office crises, looming deadlines, anxious clients who call at all hours, or foreign contacts who call without regard to time differences.
Many professional and managerial jobs simply cannot be made family-friendly and part-time. Among New York lawyers, so-called part-timers may work 40 hours a week, but they stick rigidly to their fixed hours. If, for example, you needed an important operation, would you choose a part-time surgeon who insisted on leaving on time to pick up the children, even if unforeseen complications arose, or would you choose someone who would stay on to solve the problem and sew you up again? There are reasons why there are so few women surgeons in any country.
Exceptions are rare. Pharmacists can work short fixed shifts, thanks to the law requiring someone with their qualification to be on duty in shops. In pharmacy, almost all part-timers are women, while men do the management jobs requiring overtime. That’s why pharmacy has a large hourly pay gap between men and women: about 27 per cent compared with the national average of 18 per cent.Jobs, customers and clients can be just as demanding as small children. The employee who will be most valuable to a boss is the one who gives priority to work tasks and sees things through to completion, not someone whose family always comes first. In a competitive climate, that choice of priorities can be crucial to the success of a business. And that — not prejudice or lack of imagination among bosses — is why there are so few high-paying part-time jobs.
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Catherine Hakim is author of Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital