Full-Time by Default vs. Part-Time by Norm: Gender at Work in Australia and the Netherlands

🇦🇺 Australia · 🇳🇱 Netherlands

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

Australia's gender pay gap is a widely discussed national statistic, tracked employer by employer and published by name. The Netherlands' gender gap is, on paper, smaller — but it's built on a structural fact so normalized that most Dutch people don't discuss it as a gender issue at all: roughly six in ten working Dutch women work part-time, nearly three times the OECD average, and most say they wouldn't change it.

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Do's & Don'ts

🇦🇺 Australia

🇳🇱 Netherlands

Australia: Transparent, Tracked, Still Wide

Australia has moved from voluntary gender-equity reporting to genuinely public accountability. The Workplace Gender Equality Agency's most recent employer-level data, covering roughly 10,000 employers and 5.9 million workers, put the national median gender pay gap at 11.2% — down 0.9 percentage points year-on-year — while base salary gaps, a narrower but arguably more revealing measure, sit at 21.8%. The Australian Bureau of Statistics' broader measure lands at 11.5%, and different methodologies (median vs. average, base vs. total remuneration) produce figures ranging as high as 18.6–19%, which is part of why the debate stays live in Australian media year after year.

The mechanism behind the gap is increasingly well understood, not mysterious: research on promotion behavior found women ask for raises and promotions at the same rate as men, with equal success when they do ask — the gap opens specifically around employer-initiated promotions, where women are less often tapped without asking. Combined with heavy male concentration in senior, high-bonus roles in finance, mining, and construction — sectors where 4 in 5 employers exceed the national average gap — the result is a pay gap driven less by discrimination-in-the-room and more by structural concentration at the top.

Netherlands: Small Headline Gap, Large Structural One

The Dutch gross hourly pay gap has narrowed meaningfully, from 15% in 2017 to 10.5% in 2024, according to CBS. But that number undersells the real structural divide, which shows up in hours, not wages. Nearly 60% of Dutch women work part-time — roughly three times the OECD average for women, and well over three times the rate for Dutch men — with average weekly hours of 25.4 for women versus 35.7 for men. Because of that gap in hours, the OECD's "Part-time and Partly Equal" report notes that annual earnings differences run far higher than the hourly figure suggests, closer to 32% when special remuneration is included.

Crucially, this isn't read domestically as a workplace equity failure in the way Australia's gap is. OECD research found many Dutch part-time workers report high satisfaction and no strong desire to increase their hours — the system is, to a significant degree, chosen. But the same research flags a structural feedback loop: childcare, school schedules, and public provisions are built around the part-time norm, women hold only around 20% of senior leadership roles and just 10% of CEO positions, and attitudes remain conservative — roughly 40% of men and 30% of women in national surveys still believe mothers are better suited than fathers to raising young children.

The Reckoning

The countries are, in effect, measuring different problems. Australia's gap is largely a compensation and seniority-concentration problem inside full-time careers; its transparency-driven reporting regime is designed to expose exactly that. The Netherlands' gap is largely an hours-and-structure problem that happens before the pay conversation even starts — because so many women are on part-time contracts by design, the headline hourly pay gap looks comparatively small while the annual income and leadership-pipeline gaps stay wide underneath it.

Hofstede Insights data offers a partial explanation: the Netherlands scores very low on Masculinity, reflecting a culture that prizes work-life balance and consensus over competitive achievement — a value system that helps explain why part-time work is normalized rather than penalized socially, even as it structurally slows career advancement. Australia's higher Masculinity score tracks with a more competitive, full-time-by-default career culture, where the resulting gap gets litigated openly rather than absorbed quietly into scheduling norms.

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The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — A respondent answering why 75% of Dutch working women work part-time explained it as deeply cultural rather than economic: the assumption that mothers should be present for children after school hours is built into how public institutions themselves are scheduled, not just a personal choice families make independently.

Quora — An Indian professional considering a Netherlands relocation asked specifically about job prospects for women, and respondents noted that while formal hiring processes are gender-neutral, the informal expectation to shift toward part-time hours after having children is strong enough that some women described it as a quiet, unstated norm rather than a rule anyone states outright.

r/AusFinance — In discussions of the annual WGEA pay gap release, several posters pointed to the promotion-initiative gap specifically — noting that women in their own workplaces routinely got equal outcomes when they asked for advancement, but were passed over more often when promotions were handed out proactively by management, matching the broader research finding.

InterNations — Expat parents relocating to the Netherlands described being surprised that requesting full-time hours after having a child could draw visible pushback from Dutch colleagues and even childcare providers, who they said seemed to view full-time dual-income parenting as slightly unusual rather than simply another valid choice.

Conclusion

If you're a woman moving to Australia, know the fight is largely about seniority and initiative — track your employer's actual published numbers, and don't wait to be offered advancement. If you're moving to the Netherlands, know the fight is largely about hours and structure — decide early and explicitly what working schedule you actually want, because the default cultural gravity, reinforced by school hours and childcare norms, pulls toward part-time whether or not that's what you'd choose on a blank slate. The honest version for a friend: Australia will show you the gap in a spreadsheet; the Netherlands will just quietly build your calendar around one.