The social and economic forces that shape attitudes toward the welfare state are of central concern to social scientists. Scholarship in this area has paid limited attention to how working part-time, the employment status of nearly 20% of the U.S. workforce, affects redistribution preferences. In this article, we theoretically develop and empirically test an argument about the ways that part-time work, and its relationship to gender, shape redistribution preferences. We articulate two gender-differentiated pathways—one material and one about threats to social status—through which part-time work and gender may jointly shape individuals’ preferences for redistribution. We test our argument using cross-sectional and panel data from the General Social Survey in the United States. We find that the positive relationship between part-time employment, compared to full-time employment, and redistribution preferences is stronger for men than for women. Indeed, we do not detect a relationship between part-time work and redistribution preferences among women. Our results provide support for a gendered relationship between part-time employment and redistribution preferences and demonstrate that both material and status-based mechanisms shape this association.

Using data from Understanding Society and the British Household Panel Survey, this article explores the relationship between working part-time and progression out of low pay for male and female employees using a discrete-time event history model. The results show that working part-time relative to full-time decreases the likelihood of progression out of low pay, defined as earning below two-thirds of the median hourly wage. However, part-time workers who transition to full-time employment experience similar rates of progression to full-time workers. This casts doubt on the idea that part-time workers have lower progression rates because they have lower abilities or work motivation and reinforces the need to address the quality of part-time jobs in the UK labour market. The negative effect of working part-time is greater for men than for women, although women are more at risk of becoming trapped in low pay in the sense that they tend to work part-time for longer periods of time, particularly if they have children. Factors such as childcare policy and Universal Credit (UC) incentivise part-time employment for certain groups, although in the right labour market conditions UC may encourage some part-time workers to increase their working hours.