This paper presents evidence on gender segregation in employment contracts in 15 EU countries, using micro data from the ECHPS. Women are over-represented in part-time jobs in all countries considered, but while in northern Europe such allocation roughly reflects women?s preferences and their need to combine work with child care, in southern Europe part-time jobs are often involuntary and provide significantly lower job satisfaction than fulltime ones. Women are also over-represented in fixed-term contracts in southern Europe, and again this job allocation cannot be explained by preferences or productivity differentials between the two genders. There is thus a largely unexplained residual in the gender job allocation, which may be consistent with some degree of discrimination in a few of the labour markets considered, especially in southern Europe.

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May 2004     Paper Number CEPDP0637

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This CEP discussion paper is published under the centre's Labour programme.