Cross-country variation in in paid work: A comparison between countries and genders over time

How have your employment rates and average working hours developed over time? We answer this question by describing trends in women’s and men’s labor force participation (LFP) and average weekly working hours across Europe and the United States from 1992-2021. Our analyses show that more progress was made to close gender gaps in LFP rates than in working hours. In most countries, women’s LFP rates increased considerably, but their average working hours decreased. Men’s LFP rates either decreased or stagnated, and their average working hours decreased but still remained much higher than women’s. The countervailing trends in working hours and LFP rates make it difficult to paint a coherent picture of cross-national differences in women’s and men’s paid work and of changes over time. We therefore propose a supplementary or alternative measure we call “work volume,” which records hours at zero for non-employed individuals and thus allows for straightforward comparisons of women’s and men’s overall contribution to the labor force. Use of this measure shows that gender gaps in work volume decreased over time, but that even in 2021 men’s work volume remained considerably higher than women’s—with gender gaps in work volume being lowest in the Scandinavian and the former Communist countries. In the United States, the gender gap in work volume was 7.7 hours, which is roughly equal to the average gap across the 32 countries.