The Effects of Part-Time Employment and Gender on Organizational Career Growth

Abstract

The literature on part-time employment suggests that this type of employment hampers career advancement especially for women. Conversely, role congruity theory suggests that part-time employment hampers career advancement for men. In view of the often confounded nature of gender and job status in research, we studied the main and interaction effects of job status and gender on perceived job alternatives and four subdimensions of organizational career growth. The data (N = 211) revealed (1) a main effect of job status on job alternatives: compared to part-time employment, full-time employment leads to more perceived job alternatives; (2) an interaction effect of job status and gender on career goal progress, ability development, and promotion speed: men working part-time experienced less progress, development, and promotion speed than men working full-time and women in general. These results are explained by gender-role incongruence and challenge the idea that part-time work affects women in particular.