Study finds a part-time job may hurt a man’s chances of getting hired
According to a study from the University of Austin Texas, employers often view part-time work almost as negatively as unemployment.
If you’re looking for full-time work, and relying on a part-time job to pay some bills in the meantime, you may want to leave that off your resume.
According to a new study from the University of Texas at Austin, employers often view part-time work (on men’s resumes, at least) almost as negatively as unemployment.
David Pedulla, a sociologist at the university, was interested in understanding how gender and work history affected callbacks by potential employers, so he sent out thousands of fake resumes from simulated job candidates.
Pedulla found that gender and work history played a significant role in whether employers were interested in a candidate.
The consequences of part-time work histories, Pedulla writes, are contingent on the job applicant’s gender: “Men face severe penalties for part-time work histories, but women experience no penalties.”
Women in part-time jobs were more than twice as likely to get a callback as were men in part-time jobs. And part-time male workers fared only slightly better than unemployed men.
Published this spring in the American Sociological Review, Pedulla’s research involved a field experiment in which he sent 2,420 applications to 1,210 job openings in five U.S. cities between November 2012 and June 2013.
The resumes described male and female job candidates who had graduated from large public universities in the Midwest and had similar work histories until one year earlier, when they were assigned one of five different work experiences: a full-time job, a part-time job, a job through a temporary employment agency, a job below their skill level (a sales associate at a retail store), or unemployment.
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Among both men and women with a full-time job, 10.4 percent got a callback from a potential employer. Workers in low-skill jobs saw much lower callback rates at 4.7 percent for men and 5.2 percent for women.
“For both male and female workers, taking a job below their skill level really results in severe penalties in terms of the job opportunities that are available to them,” Pedulla said.
Temp work, however, resulted in a 7.1 percent callback rate for men and an 8.3 percent callback rate for women — nearly as high as the callback rates for full-time workers.
Part-time jobs appeared to have little effect on whether employers called women back, generating a callback rate of 10.9 percent. But for men, a part-time job meant a 4.8 percent callback rate — almost as low as unemployed men’s 4.2 percent callback rate. (Unemployed women had a callback rate of 7.5 percent.)
Why is this?
Pedulla speculates in the paper that employers may perceive workers with nonstandard and mismatched employment histories as being “less competent or committed,” penalizing them compared to workers with full-time, standard employment histories that match their skills and experience.
But as to the gender discrepancy, Pedulla is a little flummoxed, telling the Wall Street Journal that “it’s difficult to disentangle underlying causes.”
“While there are certainly good reasons that people take any job they can find — specifically in cases where economic hardship is imminent—the experimental data presented here raise questions about whether all types of jobs actually open up new labor market opportunities for workers,” Mr. Pedulla writes. “Indeed, certain types of employment positions appear to send negative signals to future employers about workers’ competence and commitment, penalizing them in similar ways to remaining unemployed.”
One possible solution? Leave any low-skilled, part-time work off your resume while you job-hunt for your next big break.
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