Gender Differences in Preferences for Flexible Work Hours: Experimental Evidence from an Online Freelancing Platform

Rakesh Banerjee, Tushar Bharati, Adnan Fakir and Yiwei Qian
Additional contact information
Rakesh Banerjee: University of Exeter Business School
Adnan Fakir: University of Sussex Business School
Yiwei Qian: Southwestern University of Finance and Economics

No 25-09, Economics Discussion / Working Papers from The University of Western Australia, Department of Economics

Abstract: We conducted an experiment on a major international online freelancing platform to examine how increased flexibility in daily work hours affects female participation. We post identical job advertisements (for 320 jobs) covering a wide range of tasks (80 distinct tasks) that differ only in flexibility and the wage offered. Comparing the numbers of applicants for these jobs, we find that, while both men and women prefer flexibility, the elasticity of response for women is twice that for men. Flexible jobs attracted 24% more women and 12% more men than inflexible ones. Importantly, these increases did not compromise the quality of the applications. In contrast, there is suggestive evidence that flexible jobs attracted higher-quality female candidates. Our findings have significant implications for understanding gender disparities in labor market outcomes and for shaping equity-focused policies of organizations.

Keywords: workplace flexibility; online freelancing jobs; female labor force participation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J16 J22 L86 O14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 62
Date: 2025
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-exp, nep-hrm and nep-lab
Note: MD5 = 83bc1660ec2790703b09e250a0a2a7db
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ecompapers.biz.uwa.edu.au/paper/PDF%20of%2 ... n%20and%20Sunder.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Gender Differences in Preferences for Flexible Work Hours: Experimental Evidence from an Online Freelancing Platform (2024)
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:uwa:wpaper:25-09

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Discussion / Working Papers from The University of Western Australia, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sam Tang ().