Gender Segregation in Employment Contracts

This paper presents evidence on gender segregation in employment contracts in 15 E.U. countries, using microdata from the ECHPS. Women are overrepresented in part-time jobs in all countries considered, but while in northern Europe such allocation roughly reflects women's preferences and their need to combine work with child care, in southern Europe part-time jobs are often involuntary and provide significantly lower job satisfaction than full-time ones. Women are also overrepresented in fixed-term contracts in southern Europe, and again this job allocation cannot be explained by preferences or productivity differentials between the two genders. There is thus a largely unexplained residual in the gender job allocation, which may be consistent with some degree of discrimination in a few of the labor markets considered, especially in southern Europe.