Who works when? Towards a typology of weekly work patterns in Belgium

Abstract

The question when people work is almost always reduced to the question how much people work on (non-)standard working hours. In this contribution, we applied optimal matching techniques using Belgian data from a weekly work grid (n = 6330) to identify individuals’ work timing patterns, offering a richer analytical approach than most previous studies on (non-)standard work time. Results show that such analysis captures much more and much more relevant variation in the timing of work than simple questions. Three general and 10 more detailed weekly work patterns are identified based on two dimensions of paid work: the number of hours worked and the percentage of hours worked on non-standard periods of time. Additional analyses show that men’s work patterns depend only on job characteristics. For women, work patterns are also explained by socio-economic factors including education, presence of working partner and presence of children.