Family-friendly Working Time Arrangements: The Case of France

In France, labour market flexibility continues to be one of the key issues in labour market reform. These changes occur in a labour market characterized by a high level of mothers’ participation rate. Flexibility based on working time and work schedules could result in a worsening of work-life balance conditions. How do women, and mothers, cope with these new temporal constraints? Do they manage to get family-friendly working time arrangements? This paper uses the first French survey on work-life balance (“Families and Employers”) to develop a typology of working time arrangements. The classification is based on a set of variables describing the duration and the scheduling of work with special attention given to the employee’s access to flexibility. The results show that women are over-represented in the most flexible category, but also in the least flexible category. Children have apparently no effect.

The paper tests three explanations of why working time arrangements could differ by gender: preferences for convenient work schedules, production constraints specific to occupations and/or industries, and bargaining power of workers. Being a woman increases the likelihood of having a “super-flexible” work schedule and decreases the probability of having “shifted-inflexible” or “long-flexible” schedules. Preferences for convenient schedules turn out to play no role while production constraints and bargaining power exert significant effects and explain why women are over-represented in “fragmented-inflexible” working time arrangements.

Keywords: flexibility, working schedules, work-life balance, France