Research done recently has highlighted the existing gender gap in pay and on working-hours among women and men. Most leaders are asking questions like: How do companies treat their part-time workers? Why do they overload men with long-hours work, or what is the kind of jobs women are doing?
These problems are all fundamental issue embedded in an old-well-established culture. To get to the bottom of these requires a significant change direction of what a job should be.
Facts about part-time work:
- Quite often it is a low-paid, part-time work with no possibility for a better salary improvement.
- The changeover to motherhood marks women's professional career and working prototypes.
- Part-time is higher in mothers than in fathers; 38% of part-time mothers contrasted to 33% full-time mothers, while only 7% of fathers do.
- The most significant problem remains in the companies and how they consider their part-time workers and practices.
- We must look at improving the quality of part-time jobs.
- Poor chances and support offered to this niche for better positions and stimulus.
- Part-time workers get minor increases in their salary annually compare to what full-time workers do.
- The above condition is even worse when talking about those in lower-skilled jobs.
- Managers see this kind of work as less engaged with the company (retail sellers, nurses and teachers); this encompasses female part-time workers in lower positions.
- Full-time favour the opportunities to grow in the workforce.
- We must ponder many families struggling to balance work and childcare responsibilities causing mothers or father to just take a part-time job. As a result, the high cost of childcare makes it difficult to pay when only one parent is working part-time. So, we need to reinforce the development, promotion and salary to close de gender-gap and the working conditions of part-time jobs.
Facts about full-time work
The main problem comes from employers highly supporting an inequitable workplace-culture, favouring the full-time employee. The characteristics of this kind of job are:
- · Full-time employees work on average the most extended hours per week.
- · The UK has one of the highest amounts of part-time-working mothers in the EU.
- · While the total domestic working-hours varies, there is a clear pattern showing that when men work longer hours, women work fewer.
- · In some countries, fathers work long hours and mothers have high-levels of part-time employment.
- · The division of working-hour between couples in Sweden is more equitable, as fathers there regularly work fewer hours. Though mothers are more likely to work part-time.
- · A culture of long-working-hours reinforces traditional discrepancy of gender roles.
- · When the man in the couple works longer time, significantly increases the chances that the female partner leaves the labour market.
- · At the light of these facts, we can assume that current-workplace drift is towards working longer hours.
Predictions are that working-hours or weeks would shorten as a consequence of global companies adapting edge-technology, high-demand for work-performance practices and extreme jobs, clearly indicating that the rise of working-hours or overworking is not gender-neutral, hardening the opportunities for working-mothers.
Summing up: so, to genuinely make steps forwards on confronting the gender pay gap, we should focus on the number of hours worked by men, the principal cause of the rigorous gender-working difference.
The four-day working week or working shorter hours could be the great leveller because this approach will trim down the pre-conceived working culture disregarding the concepts around edge-technology skills, part-time, remote-work or flexible-hour jobs, as well as the modern-workspace concepts, or issues regarding diversity and inclusion, or migrants and ethnic minorities.
Dave Food
Prophetic Technology
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