Part-time work (a work-time percentage below 90%) has increased significantly over the past thirty years in Switzerland, from a quarter of employed persons in the early 1990s to more than a third today.
It mainly concerns women who in 2023 accounted for 72.2% of part-time employed persons (1 313 million compared with 507 000 men). This form of labour is three times more common among women (58.1%) than among men (19.6%). Childcare and other family responsibilities are the main reasons cited for part-time employment.
Job-sharing
Job-sharing consists of sharing a job and its responsibilities between two people working part-time, usually with a single job description. In 2021, 9.6% of part-time employees and 3.6 of all employees were sharing their job (-0.2 percentage points and -0.1 percentage points respectively compared with 2016). Women are more likely to job share than men (10.3% compared with 7.1%). Moreover, high percentages can be seen for the following part-time employed persons: employees in the economic sections “education and teaching” (18.8%) and “restaurant and hotel sector” (12.8%), in the major occupation groups “clerical support workers“ (12.2%) and “professionals“ (11.8%), or with a work-time percentage between 20% and 69% (almost 12%). Part-time workers with the youngest child aged under 15 years are also more likely to share their job with another person (youngest child under 7 years: 11.9%; youngest child between 7 and 14 years: 10.9%) than those without children under 15 years (8.6%).
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