Female Part-time Employment in the Netherlands and Spain: an analysis through reasons for its demand and branches of activity

Part-time workers have achieved legal equality throughout the European Union-15 (EU-15), although the situation concerning real equality is rather different: it exists in some Member States but not in others. In the Netherlands, part-time employment is strongly developed and there is very little discrimination against part-time workers. The rate of part-time employment is higher in the Netherlands than anywhere else in the EU-15, while in Spain the share of part-time employment is well below the EU-15 average and part-time workers are strongly discriminated against. The situation of part-time employment in these two countries is radically different. In this paper we analyse and compare the part-time employment in the Netherlands and in Spain. The focus is on female employees, as most part-timers are women. Using data from the European Labour Force Survey, we explore for 1995 and 2002 the nature of the relationship between the branches of activity and the reasons for choosing a part-time job, and find that there is a relationship between these two variables, which we characterise by means of correspondence analysis and cluster analysis.