PART-TIME WAGE PENALTIES FOR WOMEN IN PRIME AGE: A MATTER OF SELECTION OR SEGREGATION? EVIDENCE FROM FOUR EUROPEAN COUNTRIES

Using the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions data for the year 2009, the authors evaluate how vertical and horizontal job segregation explains the differential between full-time and part-time pay for prime-age women in four European countries: Austria, Italy, Poland, and the United Kingdom. The selected countries are representative of different welfare state regimes, labor market regulations, and extents and forms of part-time employment. Full-time hourly wages exceed part-time hourly wages, especially in market-oriented economies, such as Poland and the United Kingdom. Results using the Neuman-Oaxaca decomposition methods show that most of the full-time part-time wage gap is driven by job segregation, especially its vertical dimension. Vertical segregation explains an especially large part of the pay gap in Poland and the United Kingdom, where, more than elsewhere, part-timers are concentrated in low-skilled occupations and the wage disparities across occupations are quite large.