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February 2008, Vol. 131, No. 2
Gender and nonstandard work hours in 12 European countries
Harriet B. Presser, Janet C. Gornick, and Sangeeta Parashar
Across the continent of Europe, countries have adopted or advocated measures aimed at reducing the workweek for employees and making a shorter workweek more feasible. The reasons have been many and have included combating unemployment by spreading available work, alleviating various health and safety concerns, attaining a balance between work and family obligations, and, of late in several countries, encouraging gender equality, with an eye toward achieving a more symmetrical distribution of paid and unpaid work between men and women. In the scholarly literature on this topic, much attention has been paid to the number of hours Europeans work and to gender gaps in employment, but remarkably little consideration has been given to when employees’ hours are worked and even less to gender gaps in the timing of work. Accordingly, across Europe, the question of which hours employees work and what factors enter into decisions regarding a person’s working those hours demands increased attention.
This excerpt is from an article published in the February 2008 issue of the Monthly Labor Review. The full text of the article is available in Adobe Acrobat's Portable Document Format (PDF). See How to view a PDF file for more information.
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