Going part-time: sweeping changes ‘worsen ethnic divide’
17 Sep 2013 Researchers from The University of Manchester have discovered a rising tide in part-time employment affecting ethnic minority people, alongside stubbornly high overall inequalities between White and non-White groups. The Jospeh Rowntree Foundation funded analysis of Census data from 1991 to 2011 identifies sweeping changes to employment patterns among 25 to 49 year olds in England and Wales over 20 years. The changes include a rise in part-time employment of 4 percentage points for White men, while the rise is 15 percentage points for Pakistani men and a huge 30 percentage points for Bangladeshi men. While only 5% of White men are in part-time employment, the team find that between 9% and 35% of men in other ethnic groups are part-time employed. And though White women's part-time employment rate has dropped slightly over the past 20 years, rates of part-time employment have increased by between 7 and 18 percentages points for women in all other ethnic groups except for Chinese. The team also found that compared with White men and women, high levels of unemployment persisted for men and women in the Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Black Caribbean and Black African groups. Taken together, the findings show that ethnic minority people are much more likely to be in a marginal employment situation than those in the White groups.
