| Summary: | Part-time work has been a major area of employment growth for women in the UK over recent decades. Almost half the women in employment now work part-time and two-thirds have worked part-time for some part of their working lives. Part-time employment is welcomed by many women as a means of maintaining labour market participation particularly during the childcare years. However many part-time jobs are low paid and offer little opportunity for career advancement. This leads to conflicting views of the role of part-time work: allowing a full-time career to be maintained or as a dead-end trap for women’s careers. This paper examines this issue using cohort data which follows women’s labour market involvement up to age 42. The pathways followed through full-time employment, part-time employment and non-employment are found to be complex and highly varied. Using several estimation methods (pooled multinomial logits, dynamic random effects binary choice logits and selection-corrected random effects probits) on a 20-year panel we examine the relative roles of heterogeneity in characteristics and state dependence in explaining the choice of labour market state. Our major finding is that a woman’s labour market history reveals itself as the major determinant of subsequent labour market state, dominating the role of characteristics. Part-time work serves two different functions. Women whose past history involves full-time work even in conjunction with spells of part-time work or non-employment, revert to full-time work. Women whose labour market history combines spells in part-time work with non-employment are unlikely subsequently to take up full-time work.
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