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Chris Stirling is a Technology Consultant for the insurance company  Zurich. He lives in Glasgow with wife Kerry, son Oliver, who is seven, and daughter Abigail, who is three.

When Stirling joined Zurich, he worked full-time, but he reduced his hours in August 2020 to split the childcare more evenly with his wife. He says his flexible hours mean he has had time to develop his graphic design skills and use them to support local charities and his church.

“My working pattern means I get the best of both worlds, the variety of work but also quality time with my kids,” Stirling says. “I feel incredibly fortunate as I was also able to benefit from fully paid paternity leave with Abigail. This time, combined with holiday, means I’ve played a really big part in their earlier lives.”

Stirling’s situation would be very familiar if he were a woman, but as a man, he’s in the minority in the UK, where 72% of people who work part-time are women.

“Speaking to other dads, my experience is the exception rather than the norm,” he says.

This means that, as well as doing his fair share at home, by working part-time, Stirling is helping to close the gender pay gap.

Here’s The Evidence

Stirling was able to make the switch thanks to Zurich’s flexible working policy, which is designed not just to give more women more options, but also to encourage men to work fewer hours. The policy came about after Zurich took part in a government-funded project to study what actually works when it comes to closing the gender pay gap.

Zurich worked with a consultancy group, The Behavioural Insights Team, to analyse its employee data and understand its gender pay gap, which at the time was 26.3%.  The team discovered that one of the major causes of the pay gap was the difference in career outcomes for full-time and part-time workers. Those working part-time were far less likely to apply for promotions. And because far more women were working part-time, this was having a real impact on the relative pay between men and women.

“A lot of people would return from maternity leave, ask to work part-time, and then get stuck in their role,” says Shoshana Davidson, a researcher who worked on the project. “So we wondered: can Zurich advertise roles differently to enable more women to progress?”

In 2019, the company began advertising the vast majority of its roles as having “flexible, part-time or jobshare” options. If hiring managers wanted a role to be advertised as exclusively full-time, they had to provide a business case for why this was necessary. Zurich had switched the default.

Today, four times as many of Zurich’s employees work part-time. The company has seen a 72% increase in applications per vacancy and a 110% surge in applications from women. Meanwhile, part-time internal promotions increased by 167%. It’s not only women who are taking up these opportunities – while more women than men still do, the number of men working part-time has doubled. And the gender pay gap has narrowed to 12.6%.

Greedy Work

These findings don’t come as a surprise to researchers working in the field. Minna Cowper-Coles, a gender pay gap expert at King’s College London, recently published a report on job quality and parenthood in the UK, drawing on data from multiple national surveys.

“Part-time jobs tend to be worse quality, less fulfilling, less flexible, require more overtime and offer far less opportunity for promotion.” Cowper-Coles says. “There is a real stigma around part-time and flexible working and therefore a shortage of good part-time jobs.”

Cowper-Coles’ research found that, compared to women without children, mothers of primary-school aged children in the UK are 13% more likely to have low-quality jobs with more flexibility around time. Meanwhile, fathers are 16% more likely than men without children to be in high reward, poor time-quality jobs. This is what Nobel prize-winning economist Claudia Goldin describes as “greedy work” — when high-status, high-paying jobs, mostly held by men, also require long hours that push the responsibilities of care onto their partners, who are then trapped in lower quality roles to compensate. 

This story will be familiar to many women: you have a child, and due to the nature of the vast majority of parental leave policies, you are the one that takes the most leave, meaning you quickly slip into holding responsibility for most of the care work. So you drop out of the labour market, work part-time, or are forced into an occupation that doesn’t pay very well. Meanwhile, employers and wider society presume that mothers, rather than fathers, will be the ones to make career sacrifices.

« I’m researching and living this at the same time, which is pretty galling!” Cowper-Coles says. “After having children, I’ve gone part-time while my partner continues full-time. But of course, this wasn’t really a choice. It’s the system.”

Actions matter

Cowper-Coles’ research shows that in the UK, 70% of mothers would continue to work even if they didn’t need to financially. It’s just that there’s a real shortage of good jobs allowing them to do so.

But it’s crucial that men take up these opportunities too. 

“One of the things you have to be really worried about is only women taking up these policies,” says Chung, Cowper-Coles’s colleague and the author of the book The Flexibility Paradox. “When this happens, you see the policy stigmatised. But if fathers or managers are taking up the policy, the opposite happens. So we need more men and fathers to work remotely, flexibly and part-time.”

It’s not only young fathers like Stirling who have taken advantage of Zurich’s part time policy. Alan Roxburgh always thought he wanted to retire at 60. The underwriter had worked for the insurance company Zurich for 12 years. But “when the time came to retire, I just didn’t feel ready,” he said.

So Roxburgh spoke to his manager about going part time, rather than fully retiring. Thanks to Zurich’s policy, this wasn’t out of the ordinary. “We decided that I could use my knowledge and skills to work on a project basis. I’m now really enjoying working one and a half days a week, whilst also enjoying gardening and many other hobbies I’ve never had time for.”

Roxburgh and Stirling’s stories show that the impact of flexible working goes far beyond the gender pay gap, calling into question what we value in a job, our quality of life, and the examples we set for our colleagues, community, and perhaps most importantly, our children.

“We may think we are feminists, but often this is really difficult to enact when it comes to your family and your relationship with someone you’re in love with,” Chung tells me.  “It doesn’t matter what you tell your daughters and sons. If you really want your daughter to thrive and become a person who gets respect both in society and at home, you have to show it.”

She says this means asking hard questions: “What kind of gender roles are you demonstrating in the home? Who is working? Who is doing the cleaning? Who is doing the care work? That is the stuff that sticks.”

Research Round-up

Here’s what else is making the news:

1. 💼 Unpaid care responsibilities are holding back 708 million women worldwide from work, according to new estimates from the International Labour Organization.
2. 💰 The Swedish “wage pilots”, Lönelotsarna, which featured in this newsletter last month, have published their 8th report analysing Sweden’s structural pay gap for female-dominated professions. They found that the gap, after decreasing between 2015 and 2021, has begun to widen again.
3. 🩷 Contrary to stereotypes, women are, on average, happier being single than men, according to a new study from the University of Toronto.

About The Evidence

The Evidence is a supplement to the Impact newsletter designed to help you understand gender inequality – and show how we might fix it. Impact is a weekly newsletter of feminist journalism, dedicated to the rights of women and gender-diverse people worldwide.

This is the English version of our newsletter; you can read the French one here.