How do gender differences in family responsibilities affect doctors' labour supply? Evidence from Australian panel data

Jia Song and Terence Cheng ()

Social Science & Medicine, 2020, vol. 265, issue C

Abstract: We use nine annual waves of a unique longitudinal dataset of Australian doctors to examine how children and family responsibilities influence the number of hours worked by female and male medical doctors. We exploit the longitudinal feature of the data to investigate how hours worked change in response to within-doctor changes in family circumstances over time. We find strong evidence of a ‘carer effect’ of having children for female doctors, whose working hours are significantly reduced by the presence of children, the number of children, and young children. The working hours by female doctors are also strongly influenced by the employment status of their spouses. In contrast, for male doctors, having children leads to a slight increase in hours worked. The effect of children in dual medical career households is highly asymmetric: female doctors reduce their hours worked by a very large margin, whereas male doctors report not changing their working hours. Finally we also find evidence of heterogeneous effects of how family circumstances affect hours worked across different quantiles of hours worked.

Keywords: Australia; Gender difference; Hours worked; Family circumstances; Medical labour market; Panel data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953620306948
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:socmed:v:265:y:2020:i:c:s0277953620306948

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
http://www.elsevier. ... _01_ooc_1&version=01

DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2020.113475

Access Statistics for this article

Social Science & Medicine is currently edited by Ichiro (I.) Kawachi and S.V. (S.V.) Subramanian

More articles in Social Science & Medicine from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().