Part-Time Work in France: Reading the 2024 Figures

A shorter paid working week does not necessarily mean a smaller workload. Insee’s Temps partiel, published in the 2025 edition of Emploi, chômage, revenus du travail, describes part-time employment in France using the 2024 Labour Force Survey. It makes a useful distinction possible: how many people work part-time, why they report doing so, and how much freedom they have are different questions. Only the first two are directly tabulated here.

Two percentages can describe different populations

Among employees excluding apprentices, 26.7% of women and 7.9% of men worked part-time in their main job. The original tables and population notes concern people aged 15 or over living in ordinary households in France excluding Mayotte. They do not describe every resident, all unpaid work or a worldwide pattern. The entry also provides a broader series including non-salaried workers; its adjacent figures should not be substituted into the employee comparison.

The distinction matters even within one table. The proportion of women who work part-time is not the proportion of part-time workers who are women. One asks how common the arrangement is within a group; the other asks who makes up that arrangement. Confusing them turns evidence about the organization of employment into an apparently overwhelming claim about all women’s lives. Read the denominator before interpreting the gap.

The employment boundary creates another limit. Someone unable to enter paid work because care is unavailable does not appear as a part-time employee. Nor does the main-job measure count the entirety of a person’s paid and unpaid working day. The figures can identify unequal employment arrangements while leaving other forms of exclusion outside their frame. A low part-time rate would therefore not, on its own, demonstrate equality.

Reporting a family reason does not measure unconstrained choice

Among part-time employees, 29.5% of women and 8.3% of men gave caring for children or relatives as their main reason. The comparison concerns people already working part-time, not all mothers, all women or all men. The entry also records an employment constraint: 22.0% of women and 25.1% of men in this population reported not finding a full-time job. Family arrangements and the jobs employers offer both belong in the explanation.

A feminist reading asks what a respondent must organize before a full-time schedule becomes feasible. A reported care reason may express a valued relationship, a shortage of alternatives, or both. The table cannot decide which applies to an individual. Calling all such arrangements voluntary would erase constraint; calling every respondent’s preference false would erase agency. The useful question is which options exist and who bears the cost of making them possible.

Part-time prevalence also differs with the number and ages of dependent children. These descriptive comparisons are not an experiment showing the effect of childbirth on a given woman’s employment. Likewise, the fall in women’s part-time prevalence between 2014 and 2022 does not tell us whether partners took over more housework. That would require evidence about unpaid work, employment transitions and household organization, rather than one employment indicator.

The French time-use study covering 1985–2010 offers a complementary question: did a narrowing domestic-work gap result from men doing more, women doing less, or changes in the work itself? The ILO analysis of unpaid care and labour-market exclusion extends attention to people outside employment. These sources have different dates, populations and measures. Their value together is to connect employment, time and responsibility without treating their numbers as interchangeable or declaring one statistic a complete measure of emancipation.