Maik Hamjediers, a Max Weber Fellow at the EUI Department of Political and Social Sciences, is a co-author of the article Tailored to women, provided to men? Gendered occupational inequality in access to flexible working-time arrangements, published in Social Indicators Research, a leading journal for research on quality of life. In an interview, we asked about his findings on why female-dominated occupations receive fewer flexible working arrangements, despite policies promoting flexibility as a tool to support women’s work-life balance.
Your research shows that female-dominated occupations are far less likely to offer flexible working arrangements compared to male-dominated or mixed-gender occupations. What do you think drives this disparity?
This disparity actually served as the starting point for our project. Stereotypically, you might think that flexible time-working arrangements – some ability of employees to decide when to work – are promoted to women, especially mothers, who often face work-life conflicts. These arrangements are seen as a tool to help them reconcile competing demands, such as picking up their child at any time. While this might reflect the care work typically associated with women, it's a narrative that's often reproduced in policy discourse and social sciences.
However, when we examine occupational inequality, we observe that occupations with a high proportion of women tend to offer the least access to flexible working arrangements. This was unexpected, and my co-authors, Aljoscha Jacobi and Tabea Naujoks, and I wanted to understand why.
The question then becomes: What drives this disparity? We considered several factors that typically explain access to flexible working arrangements, starting with bargaining power. If you're highly valued by your employer – due to your skills or expertise – you have more leverage to demand flexible working hours. The same is true for union densities: In occupations with strong union representation, collective bargaining often leads to better work outcomes, including more flexibility.
Additionally, we also considered structural barriers. For instance, part-time work may already be seen as a solution to work-life conflicts and thereby reduces the perceived need for flexible working hours. Smaller firms may also less easily accommodate flexible schedules because it's harder to substitute workers when someone leaves early. Similarly, occupations involving client interactions may require more rigid schedules, making it harder to substitute employees on short notice.
As all these factors are differently distributed across occupations, they could help to explain why female-dominated occupations provide the least access to flexible working-time arrangements. For example, union membership has historically been stronger in manufacturing and male-dominated fields providing bargaining power to demand flexible working time arrangements or prevalent client contact in female-dominated occupations could serve as a structural limitation to implement flexible working arrangements. However, while all indicators seem to play a role, they didn’t fully explain the disparity. So, we concluded that there must be other dynamics at play.
So, what other dynamics do you think could be driving this disparity in flexible working arrangements?
My work focuses a lot on occupations and gender as two major social roles. We have deeply ingrained assumptions about men and women. And often, these stereotypes also extend to occupations. When we meet someone, we often ask, "What do you do?" and immediately associate stereotypes with their response. For example, when the response is a “I work as a nurse”, we tend to picture a woman who is caring, considerate, and agreeable.
Research has shown that these gendered perceptions of occupations contribute to wage disparities. Studies dating back to the 1990s in the US and beyond have demonstrated that female-dominated occupations tend to have lower wages on average.
One explanation is employer bias: In female-dominated occupations, employers may assume that women are less productive due to competing demands, such as childcare responsibilities, reinforcing the traditional association of women with care work. Another factor is the perception that jobs associated with caregiving or traditionally domestic tasks require less external motivation. The assumption is that people in these roles are intrinsically motivated – they just like to help or to care for others and find it fulfilling – and therefore don’t need additional compensation. As a result, employers may feel less pressure to offer higher wages.
So, we thought that this logic might extend beyond wages and that such perceptions might lead employers to offer less flexibility in female-dominated occupations. This interpretation contrasts with a common proposition of while female-dominated occupations may pay less, they compensate with other benefits, such as flexibility. However, our research shows this isn’t the case. These jobs not only offer lower wages but also provide less flexibility.
Your findings point to a cultural devaluation of female-dominated occupations. Could you explain how gender stereotypes about occupations might influence employers' decisions on providing flexibility?
Yes, we take concept of cultural devaluation of wages, and we discuss it in the context of flexible working-time arrangements.
Flexibility can be seen as a reward or work benefit. It is not only a tool to enhance work-life balance but also provide autonomy and personal satisfaction. The ability to choose when and how to work is seen as a positive in general and therefore can be seen as a non-financial reward.
So similarly to the cultural devaluation that applied to wages, the same biases could apply also to flexible working arrangements: Employers might be biased in assuming that women’s productivity is limited due to competing childcare demands or that workers in female-dominated occupations are intrinsically motivated and do their jobs because they care, not for monetary rewards. This contrasts with occupations like manufacturing, where the work is seen as unpleasant, so employers feel the need to provide higher compensation, be it wages or more flexible working options. This suggests that societal perceptions about gender, productivity, and job roles shape workplace policies in ways that disadvantage women, reinforcing existing inequalities.
How do your findings challenge the idea that flexible working is inherently a tool for addressing gender inequality in the workplace?
This is a good question. From one perspective, our findings highlight a mismatch between the discourse surrounding flexible working, particularly in policy, and the reality of how it’s implemented. Policies often present flexible working as a solution tailored to women’s needs. In fact, many feminist economists and sociologist advocate for shorter and more flexible work hours to address gender inequalities and there is also some evidence that flexible hours can help to elevate work-life conflicts. Yet it’s not always provided in female-dominated occupations. So, one way to address gender inequality could be to increase access to flexible working in these occupations, ensuring a more balanced access to flexibility.
However, there’s more to the story. Research on flexible working shows it’s a complex issue. For example, flexibility is often seen as something women desire and when men ask for flexibility, they sometimes are evaluated negatively because flexibility is associated with a lack of commitment. But at the same time, men who use flexibility tend to use it enhance their productivity, facing a risk of blurring the lines between work and personal life, while women tend to use flexible working arrangements more frequently to actually balance work and family responsibilities. This suggests that gendered expectations not only shape who has access to flexibility but also how women and men use it and how they seen by others, when they use it.
Especially, Heejung Chung highlights how flexible working arrangements relate to perceptions of who is "committed" to work, often disadvantaging women or anyone who doesn't conform to traditional ideals of work dedication. If flexible working is viewed through a gendered lens and people’s use of it is judged based on gendered perceptions, then providing equal access to flexibility might not do the trick alone.
To truly tackle these issues, we need to confront the way caregiving is predominantly ascribed to women and challenge the "ideal worker" norm, which assumes full commitment to work with no outside responsibilities. Everyone needs time for self-care and to care for others. So, while our findings reveal an imbalance in how flexibility is discussed and implemented, addressing these deeper cultural and structural issues is necessary to effectively reduce gendered inequalities in the workplace.
Maik Hamjediers is a fellow at the EUI’s Max Weber Programme for Postdoctoral Studies, the largest international postdoctoral programme in the social sciences and humanities in Europe. He is affiliated with the Department of Political and Social Sciences. His research interests lie in social stratification, gender inequalities in the labour market and domestic sphere, and the methodologies of empirical social research.