'There's no point giving somebody part-time work and not adjusting the role', academic says
Earlier this year, the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) revealed that part-time workers face a “promotion cliff”, where they lack opportunities to advance into management positions.
WGEA’s analysis found that while 21% of employees work part-time, only 7% of managers and 3% of CEOs work part-time.
"Part-time workers who want to take up leadership roles in their workplace, or to make the change from full-time or casual work, face a sudden drop-off in availability of management-level jobs that could otherwise contribute to advancing or sustaining their career," WGEA chief executive officer Mary Wooldridge said in a statement.
So how can HR teams better support part-time workers who want to enter management roles?
Gender and part-time work
Anne Bardoel, professor of human resource management at Swinburn University of Technology, highlighted that the reasons why part-time workers lack career progression opportunities cannot be disengaged from gender.
“Women outnumber men in part-time positions,” she said. “The reasons why men and women work part-time are different. When you look at women, the predominant reason why they go part-time is because they're caring for children.
“When you look at the reasons why men go part-time, and there's a lot less men who do go part-time, the predominant reason is they're going to school, college or university. So they're investing in the human capital.”
Similarly, WGEA also pinpointed the larger proportion of women who work part-time.
“A high proportion of Australian women work part-time (30% of women, compared to 11% of men), so limited access to flexible working arrangements has a disproportionate effect on women’s earning capacity and contributes to Australia’s gender pay gap,” Wooldridge said.
“Women are more likely to want or need to work part-time, and sometimes more than once in their careers.”
Child care considerations for part-time workers
On a broader scale, Australia has a high proportion of part-time workers, Bardoel said.
“If you look at other countries, they have a much lower proportion of people in the part-time workforce,” she said. “One of the reasons for why Australia is high is when you actually drill down on the data of those people in the part-time workforce, most of them are women, and the other thing is often that's combined with being in the casual workforce as well. But you're not necessarily getting a whole lot of benefits or connection to the organisation as well.”
Women in Australia also tend to work part-time from when their child is born until when the child starts school at five, and then they go back to work, Bardoel said.
“But they've lost four or five years in a critical time of a traditional career building.”
And while it could also be argued that some women want to go part-time and want to be there to care for their children, childcare costs can influence a woman’s decision to work part-time as well, she said.
“They might go out of the workforce because they're caring for children and they might also go out of the workforce because the childcare that's available to them is too expensive and they can't afford it.”
Bardoel went on to compare Australia’s reasons for part-time work to China.
“If you go to a country like China, for example, people work part-time but it's not because of anything to do with work-life balance,” she said. “That part-time work might be a second job. So if you go across, different countries have different reasons why people work part-time. Other times, it might be that there was no full-time work and so they're just picking up work…and a part-time will do.”
Barriers to career progression
Bardoel mentioned a study about women in law firms, which found that while a company may have a part-time work policy, it wasn’t necessarily usable.
“Often, there'd be stigma attached to working part-time,” she said. “Such as, ‘If you work part-time, you're not really serious about the job’. The other thing was what they described as the ‘hair cut’. Now, what that meant was…where you get paid 50% of a full time pay rate but you actually end up working 75% of the time.”
She went on to describe more reasons that affect the career progression of those working part-time, particularly for professional workers.
“The other reason why people don't progress is often when somebody goes part-time, they're given often dead-end assignments,” Bardoel said.
“They're not necessarily provided the same training, they're often taken off key committees. And so, in many ways going part-time is often seen, both by the individual and by the organisations that they work with, as a form of career suicide, in terms of doing it.”
How HR can boost part-time management
Bardoel listed some of the steps HR teams can take to support part-time workers hoping to get into senior management positions.
The first is to have a part-time work policy that is supported by the organisation.
“You must provide leadership from the top that signals that part-time is a legitimate form of working in the organisation,” she said.
“You also need to demonstrate that key people in the organisation are working part-time. Not everyone's going to work part-time, not everyone wants to work part-time. But if no one else in the organisation even gets to a senior position [who] is working part-time, it doesn't have that cultural support across the organisation.
The second step is to plan a career track for those who want to work part-time, Bardoel said.
“There are different ways that we can think about careers for part-time people. One of them is not giving people dead end jobs,” she said.
And finally, Bardoel suggested adjusting the role and the expectations around it to reduce the likelihood of ‘job creep’ – working extra hours to complete a task.
“There’s no point giving somebody part-time work and not adjusting the role,” she said.
