Does overtime work contribute to the gender earnings gap? Evidence from The Netherlands

The increasing participation of women in both education and the labour market, as well as the consequent rise in their work experience have driven the narrowing of the gap in earnings among women and men. Although the literature examining this convergence has come a long way in the last decades, there are a few insufficiently examined factors that potentially contribute to the gap. This paper combines the traditional view proposed by Labour Economics with the most contemporaneous analysis offered by Personnel Economics to examine the contribution that work hour schedules may have on the monthly earnings gap. Particularly, the focus is on overtime work. It tests the hypotheses as to whether overtime work explains part of the gender gap and if current wage gaps can be explained by overtime in the past. The results point to a positive and significant contribution of total overtime work in both the Oaxaca – Blinder and the pooled decompositions, and even after correcting for selection bias. While only the contribution of past overtime is significant in the Oaxaca – Blinder decomposition, both current and two-year lagged overtime contributions are so in the pooled decomposition